just spoke with a LinkedIn agency owner who has 20 clients and is looking for a tool like traxy.
he named every one of our competitors, then said none of them come close to the data traxy gives him.
i was having a rough day before that call.
not anymore.
> get paired as roommates at Stanford Law
> spend a lot of time debating history and philosophy, and bonding over how much you hate law school
> become close friends and stay in touch
> 10 years later you start a company together to stop counter terrorism w/ software while protecting civil liberties
> spend years building it
> everyone tells you it's not going to work
> everyone in the Valley hates you for working with the military
> it ends up working
> Palantir is the most important software company in the world
> nobody understands either of you
> develop fiercely loyal supporters and attract every conspiracy theorist on both sides
> keep proving them all wrong, again and again
> still going at it with a lot to look forward to
not just ex-founders - if you ever led a clan in CoC, hosted a minecraft server for your friends or built a robot in FRC - you're probably gonna make it
apply to wonderful
cc @tsalchino who leads our software studio product
this attitude against making money is way more destructive for value creation and prosperity than founders starting companies for "the wrong reasons"
and money is the best proxy for building what people want and global wealth creation
🇩🇪🇺🇸 Peter Thiel just pointed out a pretty brutal difference between America’s young wealthy and Germany’s.
Looking at the 50 richest people in each country who are Gen X or younger, Thiel says 9 of 12 Americans made their own fortunes.
Germany? All 20 inherited theirs.
“Not a single person did something new, made some new money, built a large new scalable company.”
Germany isn’t running out of rich people. Thiel thinks it’s running out of people getting rich by building something new.
Writer: Lynn
does anyone actually find these personal agents useful which are like
"tell me what I missed" – like do they actually find something you'd have missed.
in my case, no. maybe i dont miss anything tho.
Okay. I’ll take the bait.
I went to work for Peter in 2013 with opposite politics.
He sat me down right at the beginning.
PETER: “I don’t want the (Thiel) Foundation to do good that the market can do. That is the job of the market. Likewise, I don’t want to do the good work that is seen as good. That work can be done by people richer, weaker and more needy of approval than we are. I want us to do only the work that is *deeply* good but somehow confused for being evil, because that is the work of the courageous and the strong. We strive to be both and that is where a small foundation can make the greatest positive difference. Go look for such good and let’s do that. But remember. Good has TWO different antonyms. What is “bad work”? It could be seen as shoddy work. Or it could be seen as evil work. And we can’t do shoddy work. Why? Because evil that isn’t competent never gets to be evil. It’s just pathetic. So we have to be exceptionally competent at the good work which we do to make sure it is always confused for evil.”
I thought it totally logical. So that’s the argument. And that’s classic Peter.
This is an old idea of his. And now you know.