Peter Thiel (2014)

No, the CIA is a front for Palantir.

Start with focusing on a small market and dominate that market first.

PayPal built a payment system but failed in its goal in creating a "new world currency" (our slogan from back in 2000). Bitcoin seems to have created a new currency (at least on the level of speculation), but the payment system is badly lacking.

I will become more bullish on Bitcoin when I see the payment volume of Bitcoin really increase.

Very smart, very charismatic, and incredibly driven -- a very rare combination, since most people who have one of these traits learn to coast on the other two.

It was kind of scary to be competiting against his startup in Palo Alto in Dec 1999-Mar 2000.

Most people deal with aging by some strange combination of acceptance and denial. I think the psychological blocks to thinking about aging run very deep, and we need to think about it in order to really fight it.

Yes, on both a micro and a macro scale.

Micro: the 83 fellows have collectively raised $63 million, and a number of their companies are tracking towards solid Series B venture rounds. Almost all of them did and learned far more than they would have in college.

Macro: we started an important debate about the education bubble. Student debt is over $1 trillion in this country, and much of that money has gone to pay for lies that people tell about how great the education they received was.

Most people believe that capitalism and competition are synonyms, and I think they are opposites. A capitalist accumulates capital, and in a world of perfect competition all the capital gets competed away: The restaurant industry in SF is very competitive and very non-capitalistic (e.g., very hard way to make money), whereas Google is very capitalistic and has had no serious competition since 2002.

Ben Horowitz

We've had these debates about net neutrality for over 15 years. It hasn't been necessary so far, and I'm not sure anything has changed to make it necessary right now.

And I don't like government regulation: We need the US government to regulate the internet about as much as we need the EU to regulate Google -- I suspect the cons greatly outweigh the pros, especially in practice.

We would never design a system like this if we were starting from scratch.

If technology involves doing more with less, than US health care (like US education) is the core of "anti-technology" in this country: For the last four decades, we have been spending more and more for the same (or even for less).

The zero-sum world it portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood.

Not optimal if you break the law to the point where the company gets shut down (think Napster). I'm not saying that will happen to Uber, but I think they've pushed the line really far.

It is a much-needed debate.

BTW, I don't agree with the libertarian description of the NSA as "big brother." I think Snowden revealed something that looks more like the Keystone Kops and very little like James Bond.

The first thing an intelligence agency should do is counter-intelligence, and the NSA could not even figure out that there was something suspicious about an IT person downloading all those files. And once they knew Snowden had done this, they apparently still couldn't figure out what all he had taken...

It was inappropriate that the US was tapping Angela Merkel's cell phone. But I suspect that this was news to Obama as well. And more generally: the NSA has been hovering up all the data in the world, because it has no clue what it is doing. "Big data" really means "dumb data."

All three.

Biggest mistake ever was not to do the Series B round at Facebook.

General lesson: Whenever a tech startup has a strong up round led by a top tier investor (Accel counts), it is generally still undervalued. The steeper the up round, the greater the undervaluation.

At 22, I didn't think it was important to meet people.

I'm flattered, but not totally obvious to me -- e.g., I think super thin cars are a sign of economic stagnation, not of progress...

I did not know him personally, but it is just really sad that he died.

To think of Christ as a politician might be the easiest way to get him all wrong.

The theological claim that Christ is the "son of God" is also the anti-political claim that Augustus Caesar (the son of the divine Julius Caesar) is not the "son of God." So I think that Christ should be thought of as the first "political atheist," who did not believe that the existing political order is divinely ordained.

Now, I think that there is lot of resonance between political atheism and libertarianism, even if they are not strictly identical...

USA is still best for software companies. I worry that other sectors are too heavily regulated here...

Can’t make it — will be in New York then. But my colleagues Mike Gibson, Jonathan Cain, and Danielle Strachman will be there (and Danielle is judging) so you’re in good hands.

Lots and lots of them...

I like the genre of past books written about the future, e.g.:
Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis
JJ Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge
Norman Angell, The Great Illusion
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

Three parts to Piketty:

1 He describes a world of greater inequality. I think this is happening and is an important phenomenon.
2 He explains the phenomenon as driven by high returns on capital. I think this explanation is incorrect (the real returns have been negative since 2008, with interest rates at 0% and inflation at 2% in the US).
3 He proposes much higher marginal tax rates and a wealth tax. I think this is very bad policy and almost impossible to implement, and will result in massive distortions as people try to shelter more income and wealth.

I think we need to find ways to grow the overall economy faster -- without faster growth, inequality will be the least of our problems.

Polarization is happening because of the lack of growth and the increasingly zero-sum nature of our society. Without win-win solutions, there is less room for compromise.

Paradoxically, I think the polarization masks the increasing sameness of the two major parties. They hate each other more and more, as they become more and more alike, like the Capulets and the Montagues in "Romeo and Juliet"...

Bonus tip for philanthropists: Find a way to sue Intellectual Ventures. If we could get rid of these parasites, we'd all be better off.

Biomedical area, generally: We've made a lot less progress in the "war on cancer" than was expected in the early 1970s. And our expectations of future progress have been diminished so much that a comparable declaration of "war on Alzheimer's" would be unthinkable today.

In the Soviet Union, chess was considered a sport -- and I think that's the one thing the communists got right.

I think AI is still a fair ways off. But the economic questions (e.g., how will this impact our work?) are secondary to the political questions (e.g., will AI be friendly?).

The development of AI would be as momentous as the landing of extraterrestrials on this planet. If aliens landed, the first question would not be about the economy!

Probably. But the real issue is that Chigurh did not overcome chance himself.

"No Country for Old Men" is the movie that chapter 6 of my book is directed against.

I agree the balance has shifted somewhat towards entrepreneurs. It is more important for VCs to be supportive of founders. Sociopathic investor behavior that worked shockingly well in the 1980s and 90s will work much less well in today's more transparent and founder-centric world.

As an investor, I think one must always maintain a certain amount of humility. There is only so much we can do to help the companies in which we invest. And because of this, the act of making the investment (rather than the ability to fix things later) remains by far the most important thing we do.

Perhaps you should not become an entrepreneur...

If our great expectations about the future are not realized, then we need to save way more than we are doing today. China (with 40% savings) is perhaps more "rational" than the US (with about 0% savings), at least in a world of general stagnation.

The dual Elon Musk empire of Tesla and SpaceX.

We're at the beginning of the end of the drug war, but it will still have a lot more casualties before we get to the end of the end.

I like it when the DNA of these companies resembles that of software companies -- a group of really committed founders with a clear vision of what they're trying to do.

Unfortunately, many of the ventures are instead led by part-time university professors (who rationally decide not to give up tenure) and a "hit or miss" mindset on whether the technology is going to work.

No absolute and timeless sartorial rules.

But, in Silicon Valley, wearing a suit in a pitch meeting makes you look like someone who is bad at sales and worse at tech.

1 no absolute ban, just think most MBA's tend to be high extrovert/low conviction people -- a combination that in my experience leads towards extremely herd-like thinking and behavior
2 yes, I think K-12 should give people enough skills to be able to contribute towards our society -- it is failing because it does not even come close to this

I understand why people are starting way more companies in the world of bits than in atoms, and this does make sense on the level of the founders of many of these companies, for the reasons you cite...

But as a society, I do worry that we've gotten the balance a bit off.

The worry is that AGI has no value short of the final product, which may be worth trillions of dollars and a century away...

No hard and fast rules, but if you don't want to split shares evenly then perhaps you should not be co-founders.

The right strategy is often to scale users before scaling revenues.

While some of these startups may be overvalued, we need to resist the temptation to always think that we're seeing a redux of the 90s bubble wherever we look.