Peter Thiel: Europe will never have massive tech companies because they fear success.
"In Silicon Valley, there's this pornography of failure. You talk about all your failures, and this somehow means you're going to succeed."
"In the social democratic European societies, it's acceptable to be moderately successful, it's not acceptable to be wildly successful. If you have a successful company that's starting to grow, it will get short-circuited, and you'll sell the company. You'll never get to an enormous company if you sell it along the way."
"The single most important decision in the history of Facebook— summer of 2006. It was two years into the company. We got an acquisition offer for $1B from Yahoo to buy the company. There were three of us on the board— Mark Zuckerberg, myself, and another VC. We had a meeting to decide if we should take the $1B."
"The two of us thought it was a lot of money, we should maybe take it. Mark started the board meeting— 'this is a pro forma thing, we're just going to talk about this for 10 minutes. Obviously we're not taking it.'"
"Any super big tech company is one where you've been offered multiple times for people to buy it, and you've chosen never to sell it. You're not that afraid of success."
"In Europe, the answer is to check out sooner rather than later and go back to the decade-long vacation that people are on in Europe."
The fact that orbital compute is (soon) the most efficient way to build datacenters says a lot about how much excessive regulation has harmed progress on earth.
It’s more efficient to fly to outer space than to try and build on land.
Freedom is always on the frontier.
The U.S. constitution was a breakthrough in that it protected citizens from tyrannical government. What it missed, and what we should try to integrate into the next constitution (on Mars, special economic zones, etc), is restraint against unchecked growth of regulation and government spending.
I’ve been slowly collecting proposals for how that could work. Might do a post on it at some point.
From a school notice: "Due to GDPR unfortunately, we cannot share the names of the other students in the class." 🤯
When the GDPR prevents you from knowing the names of next year's classmates, something has gone horribly, Europeanly wrong.
Who are the smartest people thinking about Mars colonization, space travel and humanity becoming an interplanetary species?
Looking for recommendations: books, newsletters, blogs, podcasts, researchers, founders, engineers, and anyone else I should be following or talking to.
Thinking of starting a newsletter on the topic.
Paying a lawyer thousands an hour and not asking for a fee quote upfront before they begin is the most expensive form of politeness there is.
I used to sit in the lawyers chair. Every bill without an agreed number ended up with me deciding how much I could get away with charging... and that always ended up being a lot more money than if the client had just asked for a quote to begin with.
Ask for the number. It moves more than you'd think.
Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.
https://t.co/3GQUlfH58t
I was wrong about this. The biggest threat to your SAAS company over the next 3 years is your customer’s agent realizing that it could build it in 5 minutes.
The media ecosystem in Europe is insanely out of touch. On @etnshow the same day re Fable we heard from:
- UK AI Minister
- ElevenLab’s Field CTO
- Co-author of Europe 2031
All of the interviews and expert opinions on these crucial topics were broadcast live out as they were happening and highlights were distributed hours after.
We care deeply about the continent and its position in a post-AI world and will continue to do everything we can to keep people informed.