Lecture 5 - Competition is for Losers (Peter Thiel)

Summary

In this talk, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, discusses the importance of creating a monopoly to build a valuable company. He emphasizes that successful businesses should aim to capture a significant share of the value they create. Thiel contrasts the stability and profitability of monopolies with the cutthroat competition and low margins of perfectly competitive industries. He advises startups to target small markets, achieve dominance, and then expand, using examples like Google and Amazon to illustrate his points. Thiel also challenges the common business school approach, suggesting that true innovation often lies in pursuing unique paths rather than following the crowd.

Takeaways

• 🚀 **Monopoly Mindset**: Peter Thiel emphasizes that entrepreneurs should aim for monopoly rather than engage in competition, as competition often leads to lower profits and less innovative businesses.
• 💡 **Value Creation Formula**: A valuable company is defined by two factors: creating X dollars of value for the world and capturing Y% of that value. The key is that X and Y are independent, meaning a business can create significant value yet capture a small percentage of it.
• 🔍 **Industry Comparison**: Thiel contrasts the airline industry with Google, showing that despite airlines having higher revenues, Google's profitability and market valuation are much greater due to its ability to capture a larger share of the value it creates.
• 🌐 **Monopoly vs. Competition**: He argues that there are essentially only two types of businesses: those in perfect competition and monopolies. Monopolies are more stable and can be more valuable, despite competition being often perceived as a positive societal force.
• 🤥 **The Lies of Business**: People in monopolistic positions tend to downplay their dominance to avoid regulation, while those in competitive markets may overstate their uniqueness to attract investment, leading to a distortion of the true nature of their businesses.
• 🏆 **Starting Small to Dominate**: Thiel advises startups to begin by targeting small, overlooked markets, which can then be expanded to achieve a monopoly, rather than starting with large markets that invite intense competition.
• 🛠️ **Proprietary Technology**: Monopolistic companies often have proprietary technology that provides a significant advantage over competitors, which is a key factor in their ability to capture value.
• 💼 **Network Effects and Economies of Scale**: Successful monopolies may benefit from network effects, where the value of a product or service increases with the number of users, and economies of scale, which allow for lower costs as output increases.
• 🕰️ **The Last Mover Advantage**: Thiel suggests that being the last mover in a market can be advantageous, as it implies that a company has created a lasting monopoly that will not be easily disrupted by new entrants.
• 🔮 **Future Value Focus**: Most of the value of a company lies in its future cash flows, which is why durability and the ability to maintain a monopoly over time are more important than short-term growth rates.
• 🚧 **The Risk of Competition**: Thiel expresses skepticism about the lean startup methodology, suggesting that great companies often make significant leaps rather than incremental improvements, and that focusing too much on competition can lead to a loss of focus on what is truly valuable.

Q & A

What is the main thesis Peter Thiel presents in his talk?

Peter Thiel argues that when starting a company, one should aim for monopoly and avoid competition, as competition is generally not profitable and monopolies can lead to more stable and valuable businesses.

According to Thiel, what is the basic formula for creating a valuable company?

Thiel suggests the formula involves two variables: creating X dollars of value for the world and capturing Y% of X. The critical insight is that X (value created) and Y (percentage captured) are independent variables.

Why does Thiel believe competition is for losers?

Thiel posits that competition often leads to businesses that do not make money, as seen in industries like airlines, which have historically low profit margins and a history of bankruptcy.

What is the difference between perfect competition and monopoly according to Thiel?

In perfect competition, there are many competitors, low profit margins, and businesses are not stable or long-term. Monopolies, on the other hand, are stable, have higher profit margins, and are more valuable because they dominate the market.

Why does Thiel suggest that businesses tend to lie about their market position?

Businesses lie about their market position to either avoid regulation (if they are a monopoly) or to attract capital and differentiate themselves (if they are in a competitive market).

What is the 'small market' strategy Thiel recommends for startups?

Thiel advises startups to start with a very small, niche market, capture the entire market, and then expand outwards. This approach allows for less competition initially and the potential for growth.

How does Thiel describe the characteristics of successful monopoly businesses?

Thiel identifies several characteristics of successful monopolies, including proprietary technology that is an order of magnitude better than the next best thing, network effects, economies of scale, and strong branding.

What is Thiel's view on the importance of being the 'last mover' in a market?

Thiel believes that being the last mover, or the last company in a category, is advantageous because it implies that the company has established a lasting monopoly that others cannot easily disrupt.

Why does Thiel emphasize the importance of capturing value over creating value?

Thiel stresses that while creating value is important, capturing a significant portion of that value is what leads to a business's success and profitability.

What does Thiel suggest about the relationship between innovation and capturing value in the history of science and technology?

Thiel suggests that throughout history, many significant innovations in both science and technology have not resulted in financial rewards for the innovators, indicating that the structure of the industry and the ability to capture value are critical.

What is Thiel's perspective on the lean startup methodology and its focus on iteration?

Thiel expresses skepticism towards the lean startup methodology, arguing that great companies often make a quantum leap with unique insights rather than relying on iterative customer feedback.

How does Thiel view the role of competition in validating business ideas?

Thiel challenges the notion that competition validates the value of a business idea, suggesting that competition itself can be problematic and that it's often better to seek unique opportunities away from the competitive herd.

Outlines

00:00

🚀 The Pursuit of Monopoly and Avoidance of Competition

Peter Thiel emphasizes the importance for entrepreneurs to aim for monopoly and avoid competition, arguing that competition is a sign of losing. He introduces the concept that a valuable business is one that creates significant value for the world and captures a percentage of that value. Thiel contrasts the airline industry with Google to illustrate the difference in value creation and capture, highlighting the inefficiency and lack of profitability in highly competitive markets compared to the stability and profitability of monopolies.

05:01

🌟 The Dichotomy of Business: Perfect Competition vs. Monopoly

Thiel presents a binary view of businesses, suggesting there are only two types: those in perfect competition and those with monopolies. He explains that people often lie about the nature of their businesses due to fear of regulation or desire for capital, with monopolists downplaying their dominance and competitors exaggerating their uniqueness. Thiel discusses the lies told by non-monopolies, such as claiming to be in a very small market, and monopolies, such as Google, which describe themselves in broader terms to appear less dominant.

10:05

🏆 The Art of Building a Monopoly: Starting Small and Expanding

Peter Thiel discusses strategies for building a monopoly by starting with a small, focused market and expanding from there. He advises against targeting large markets initially due to intense competition and suggests that successful companies often start with a niche they can dominate before growing. Examples include Amazon beginning as an online bookstore and eBay starting with Pez dispensers. Thiel stresses the importance of capturing a small market completely before expanding.

15:05

💡 The Counterintuitive Approach to Market Size in Business Strategy

Thiel explains the counterintuitive idea of targeting small markets that others may overlook as a path to building a successful business. He uses PayPal's initial focus on eBay power sellers and Facebook's launch at Harvard as examples of how concentrating on a small, specific market can lead to rapid growth and eventual expansion. Thiel warns against the pitfalls of entering large, established markets where competition is fierce and differentiation is difficult.

20:06

🛠️ The Characteristics of Monopoly Businesses in Technology

Peter Thiel outlines the characteristics that often define a monopoly business, including proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and strong branding. He suggests that technology companies can achieve monopolistic power through significant improvements over existing solutions and the ability to scale quickly. Thiel also emphasizes the importance of durability over time, arguing that lasting monopolies are more valuable than short-lived ones.

25:07

⏳ The Time Dimension of Monopoly Characteristics

Thiel discusses the temporal aspect of monopoly characteristics, such as network effects becoming more robust over time and the need for proprietary technology to remain superior to prevent being superseded. He stresses the importance of maintaining a monopoly over time, suggesting that the value of a company is largely determined by its future cash flows and the ability to remain the leading company in its field.

30:11

🤔 The Disparity Between Innovation and Financial Reward

Thiel explores the historical context of innovation, noting that many significant scientific and technological advancements have not resulted in financial rewards for their creators. He argues that the structure of industries and the ability to capture value are critical factors in the success of a business. Thiel points out that in many cases, the value created is not captured by the innovators, leading to a disparity between societal value and personal reward.

35:13

🧐 The Myth of Competition and the Psychology of Mimicry

Peter Thiel challenges the common belief in competition as a form of validation, suggesting that competition itself may be the problem rather than an indicator of value. He discusses the psychological aspects of competition, such as the human tendency to imitate and follow the crowd, and warns against the dangers of equating competition with validation. Thiel encourages thinking differently and seeking less competitive paths.

40:14

🎓 Reflections on Education, Competition, and the Value of Uniqueness

In the final paragraph, Thiel reflects on his personal experiences with competition, from being tracked for success at a young age to working at a prestigious law firm. He discusses the intense competition in academia and the legal profession, suggesting that the fierce battles for small stakes can be a form of insanity. Thiel advises not to follow the crowd through the tiny door but to seek the vast gate that others are not taking, emphasizing the importance of pursuing unique and meaningful endeavors.

Keywords

💡Monopoly

A monopoly refers to a market condition in which one company has exclusive control over a product or service. In the context of the video, Peter Thiel emphasizes the importance of aiming for a monopoly to create a valuable company. He argues that monopolies are stable and can capture a significant portion of the value they create, unlike competitive industries which often result in lower profit margins and frequent bankruptcy cycles.

💡Competition

Competition is the economic struggle among similar businesses striving for the same target audience. Thiel posits that competition is for 'losers' in the sense that it often leads to lower profits and a struggle for survival rather than market dominance. The video suggests that entrepreneurs should seek to avoid competition by creating unique value that is not easily replicated.

💡Value Creation

Value creation is the process of generating economic, social, or other forms of value. Thiel discusses a formula for a valuable company, where it must create a certain amount of value (X dollars) and capture a percentage (Y%) of that value. The script illustrates the importance of both creating value and capturing a share of it, using the airline industry versus Google as an example.

💡Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is an individual who creates a new business, bearing the risks and benefits of its success or failure. Thiel's message is directed towards entrepreneurs, advising them to aim for monopoly to achieve long-term success and to avoid the pitfalls of high competition.

💡Market Capitalization

Market capitalization is the total market value of a company's outstanding shares of stock. Thiel uses the term to compare the valuation of the entire U.S. airline industry to Google, highlighting the disparity in market value despite the airline industry's larger revenue, underscoring the difference in profitability and value capture.

💡Profit Margins

Profit margins measure how much profit a company makes for every dollar of revenue. In the script, Thiel contrasts the low profit margins of the airline industry, which has historically been unprofitable, with the high profit margins of Google, demonstrating the financial success of capturing value in a monopolistic market.

💡Economies of Scale

Economies of scale occur when the cost per unit of production decreases as the scale of production increases. Thiel mentions that software businesses are particularly good at leveraging economies of scale due to the low marginal cost of producing additional software copies, which can contribute to building a monopolistic business.

💡Network Effects

Network effects occur when the value of a product or service increases with the number of people using it. Thiel identifies network effects as one of the characteristics that can help a business become a monopoly over time, as they can create a self-reinforcing cycle of growth and value.

💡Branding

Branding is the process of creating a unique name, symbol, or design that identifies and differentiates a product or service. Thiel acknowledges the power of branding in creating value, even though he personally does not invest in companies based solely on their branding, recognizing it as a phenomenon that can contribute to a company's monopoly status.

💡First Mover Advantage

The first mover advantage is the advantage gained by a company that is the first to introduce a new product or service to the market. Thiel challenges this concept by suggesting that being the last mover, or the last company in a category, can be more valuable, as it implies having created a lasting and dominant product or service.

💡Vertical Integration

Vertical integration is a business strategy where a company owns or controls several stages of the production or distribution process. Thiel points out that vertically integrated monopolies, like Ford and Standard Oil in the past, can be very valuable because they control all aspects of their production, which can lead to significant advantages over competitors.

💡Risk Mitigation

Risk mitigation involves the process of identifying, assessing, and prioritizing risks to minimize or avoid them. Thiel expresses skepticism about the lean startup methodology, which emphasizes iterative feedback to mitigate risk, suggesting that it may not be the path to creating a monopolistic business that makes a significant and lasting impact.

Highlights

Peter Thiel emphasizes that entrepreneurs should aim for monopoly to avoid competition, suggesting competition is for losers.

A valuable company is defined by creating value for the world (X dollars) and capturing a fraction (Y%) of that value.

X (value created) and Y (fraction captured) are independent; a business can be valuable even if Y is small, given a large X.

The airline industry versus Google on search illustrates the difference in profitability and market valuation despite similar industry sizes.

In perfect competition, consumer surplus is maximized, but businesses rarely make profits due to intense competition.

Monopolies are characterized by stability, higher capital, and long-term value creation, unlike competitive industries.

Thiel argues there are only two types of businesses: perfectly competitive and monopolies, with very little in between.

People often lie about the nature of their businesses; monopolists pretend not to have a monopoly, while non-monopolists pretend to have one.

Monopolies describe their markets as vast to avoid appearing dominant, while non-monopolies describe their markets as small to seem unique.

Examples of market distortion include restaurants claiming uniqueness and Google describing itself in various ways to seem less of a monopoly.

Tech companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have accumulated cash due to their monopoly-like positions.

To build a monopoly, startups should target small markets, dominate them, and then expand, rather than starting with large markets.

Successful companies like Amazon, eBay, and PayPal started with small, focused markets and expanded over time.

Competing in large markets can be a sign of poor category definition and often leads to excessive competition.

Monopolies often have proprietary technology that is significantly better than the next best alternative.

Network effects, economies of scale, and branding contribute to the durability and value of a monopoly business.

The value of technology companies is heavily weighted towards future cash flows, emphasizing the importance of lasting power.

The 'last mover' advantage suggests being the final company in a category that matters, capturing enduring value.

Thiel challenges the audience to rethink competition, suggesting it might be a pathological pursuit rather than a sign of value.

The history of innovation is often one where creators of value do not capture it, especially in science and competitive industries.

Thiel concludes by advocating for seeking less competitive paths and focusing on creating meaningful, lasting value.

Transcripts

Good afternoon.

Today's speaker is Peter Thiel.

Peter, was the founder of PayPal, and

Palantir, and Founders Fund, and has invested in most of

the tech companies in Silicon Valley.

And he's going to talk about strategy and competition.

Thank you for coming, Peter. >> Awesome.

Thanks, Sam.

Thanks for inviting me.

Thanks for having me.

I sorta, I have a single a day

fixed that I'm completely obsessed with in.

On the business side which is that, if you're starting

a company, if you're the founder,

entrepreneur starting a company,

you always want to aim for

monopoly, and that you want to always avoid competition.

Hence, competition is for losers.

Something we'll be talking about today.

I'd like to start by saying something

about the basic idea of when you start one

of these companies how you go about, creating value?

And this question, what makes a business valuable?

And I wanna, suggest that there's basically,

a very simple very simple formula that

you, have a valuable company two things are true.

Number one, that it creates X dollars of value for

the world.

And number two, that you capture Y% of X.

And the critical thing that I think people always miss

in the sort of analysis is that X and y are completely

independent variables, and so X can be very big.

Y can be very small.

X can be of intermediate size.

And if Y is, is reasonably big you can still get

a very big business.

So, to create a valuable company you have to

basically, both create something of value and

capture some fraction of

the value of what you've created.

And sort of,

just to illustrate this is a contrast.

If you sorta, compare the US airline industry with

a company like Google on search.

If you sorta, measure by

the size of these industries you could, you could say

that airlines are still more important than search.

If you just measure it say by revenues.

There's 195 billion.

In domestic revenues in 2012.

Google had just north of 50 billion.

And certainly, sort of on some intuitive level,

if you said, if you were given a choice and

said well do you want to get rid of all air travel.

Or do you want to get rid of your ability to

use search engines?

The intuition would be that air travel is

something that's more important than search.

And this is, of course, just the domestic numbers.

If you had looked at this globally, airlines are much,

much bigger than search, or Google, is But

the profit margins are quite a bit less.

You know,

they were marginally profitable in 2012.

Think entire hundred year history of

the airline industry.

The cumulative profits in the U.S.

have been approximately zero.

The companies make money.

They episodically go bankrupt.

They get re-capitalized and

you sort of cycle and repeat.

And this is reflected in you know the combined market

capitalization of the airline industries maybe

something of the U.S. airline industry.

Something like a quarter that of Google.

So, you have a search engine much,

much smaller than air travel but much more valuable and

I think this reflects these very different valuations on

X and Y.

So, you know, if we look at perfect competition.

You know there are, sort of, there's some pros and

cons to the world of perfect competition.

On a high level it's always,

this is what you study in Econ One.

It's always, it's easy to model, which I think is why

Econ professors like talking about perfect competition.

It somehow is efficient, especially,

in a world where things are static because you have all

the consumer surplus gets captured by everybody.

And politically, it's what we're told is good in

our society, that you want to have competition and

this is somehow a good thing.

Of course, there are a lot of negatives.

It's generally not that good if you're.

You're involvement in anything that's

hyper-competitive because you often don't

make money off, come back to this a little bit later.

So, I think at one end of the spectrum you have

industries that are perfectly competitive.

And at the other end of the spectrum you have

things that, I would say, are monopolies.

And they're much stable, longer term businesses,

you have more capital.

And if you get a creative monopoly for

inventing something new, I think it's symptomatic of

having created something really valuable.

And so I do think this, the extreme binary view of

the world I always articulate is that

there are exactly two kinds of businesses in this world.

There are businesses that are perfectly competitive

and there are businesses that are monopolies.

And, there's shockingly little that is in between.

And this dichotomy is not understood very

well because people are constantly lying

about the nature of the businesses they're in.

And this is why,

this is in my mind, this is the most important.

It's not necessarily the most important thing in

business, but I think it's the most

important business idea that people don't understand.

That there are just these two kinds of businesses.

And so let me

say a little bit about the lies that people tell.

And so you basically, the basic, if you sort of

imagine that there was a spectrum of companies from

perfect competition to monopoly.

The apparent differences are quite small.

Because the people who have monopolies pretend not to.

They will basically say, and it's because you

don't want to get regulated by the government, you

don't want the government to come after you.

So you will never say that you have a monopoly.

So, anyone who has a monopoly will pretend that

they're in incredible competition.

And on the other end of the spectrum, if you

are incredibly competitive, and if you're in some sort

of business will you will never make any money.

You will be tempted to tell a lie that goes in

the other direction.

Where you will say that you're doing something

unique that is somehow less competitive than it looks.

Because you will want to differentiate, you

will want to track capital or something like that.

So, if the monopolists pretend not to have

a monopolies the non-monopolists pretend to

have monopolies.

The apparent difference is very small.

Where as the real difference I would submit is

actually quite big.

And so there's this distortion that happens

because of the lies people tell about their businesses.

And the lies are sort of in these opposite directions.

Let me, drill a little bit down further on the way

these lies work.

And so

the basic lie you tell as

a non-monopoly is that we're in a very small market.

The basic lie you tell as a monopoly is

that the market you're in is much bigger than it looks.

And so typically,

if you want to think this in sort of set theoretic terms.

You could say that a monopoly tells a why,

where you describe your business as the union of

these vastly different markets, and

the non-monopolies describes it as the intersection.

So, that in effect, if you're non-monopolist, you

will rhetorically describe your market as super small.

You're the only person in that market.

If you have monopoly, you'll describe it as super big,

and there's lots of competition in it.

So some examples of how this works in practice.

So I always use restaurants as the example of

a terrible business.

And there's always, sort of, ideas that,

you know, capitalism and competition are antonyms.

Capital, someone who accumulates capital.

World of perfect competition is

a world where all the capital gets competed away.

So, you're opening a restaurant business.

No one wants to invest because you just lose money.

So you have to tell some idiosyncratic narrative.

And you will say something like, well,

we're the only British food restaurant in Paolo Alto.

So, it's British, Paolo Alto.

And of course,

that's too small a market because people may be able

to drive all the way to Mountain View or even Park.

And there probably no people who eat nothing but

British food.

At least, no people are still alive.

And so that is sort of a fictitiously narrow market.

There's sort of a Hollywood version of this where.

The way movies always get pitched is, it's like

a college football star, joins an elite group of

hackers to catch the shark that killed his friends.

So, that is a movie that has not been made.

But the question is,

is that the right category or is the correct category?

It's just another movie, in which case, you know,

there are lots of those, it's super competitive,

incredibly had to make money.

No one ever makes money in Hollywood doing movies.

It's really hard.

And so you always have this question about.

Does the intersection, does,

is it real, does it make sense,

does it have value that one should ask?

And of course, there are start up versions of this.

Where you, and the sort of the really bad versions you

just take a whole series of buzz words.

Sharing, mobile, social, apps, you combine them,

and you have some kind of narrative.

And, whether or not, that's a real business or not,

is, it's generally a bad sign.

So it's, it's almost this pattern recognition when you

have this rhetoric of this

sort of intersections, it generally does not work.

The something of

somewhere is really mostly just the nothing of nowhere.

It's like the Stanford of North Dakota.

One of a kind, but it's not Stanford.

So, let's look at the opposite.

The opposite lie, is if you are, let's say,

the search, company, that's down the street from here.

And has about a happy 66% market share and, you know?

Is completely dominant in the search market.

Google has not almost never describes itself.

As a search engine, these days.

And instead, it describes itself in all these

different ways.

So, it sometimes says it's an advertising company.

So, if it was search, you'd say, well, it's, like, it

has this huge market share that's really, really crazy.

It's like a incredible monopoly.

It's much bigger than, it's much,

much more robust monopoly than Microsoft,

ever had in the 90s.

Maybe that's why it's making so much money.

But if you say it's an advertising market,

you could say,

well, there's search advertising is 17 billion.

And that's part of online advertising,

which is much bigger.

And then, all US advertising is bigger.

And then by the time you get to global advertising,

that's close to 500 billion.

And so you're talking about 3.5%.

So a tiny part of this much larger market.

Or if you don't want it to be an advertising company

you could always say that you're a technology company.

And so sorry.

Let me just see.

And so

the technology market is something like a $1 trillion

market, and the narrative that you tell is that Google

in the technology market is well we're competing with

all the car companies with our self-driving cars,

we're competing with Apple on TVs and iPhones.

We're competing with Facebook.

We're competing with Microsoft on office

products, we're competing with Amazon on cloud

services, and so, we are in this giant technology market

where there's competition in every direction you look.

And no we're

not the monopoly the government's looking for and

we should not get regulated in any way whatsoever.

And so I think one has to always be super aware that

there are these very powerful incentives

to distort the nature of these markets

one way or the other.

So, the evidence of the narrow markets in

the tech industry is if you basically just.

If you look at sort of the, some of the big

tech companies, Apple, Google, Microsoft,

Amazon, they just they've just been building up

cash for year after year and you have these incredibly

high profit margins and I would, I would say that the.

That one of the reasons the tech industry in the US.

Has been so successful financially.

Is because it's prone to creating all these monopoly

like business.

And that's and

it's reflected by these companies.

Just accumulate so much cash.

That they don't know what to do with it

beyond a certain point.

And so let me

say a few things about how to build a monopoly.

And, I think one of the sort of very counter

intuitive ideas that comes out of this monopoly thread.

Is that you want to go after small markets.

If you're a startup.

You want to get to monopoly.

You're starting a new company,

you want to get to monopoly.

Monopolies you have a large share of a market,

how do you get to a large share of a market?

You start with a really small market and

you take over that whole market, and then.

And then over time you find ways to expand that market

in concentric circles.

And the thing that's always a big mistake is going

after a giant market on day one.

Because that's typically evidence that you

somehow haven't defined the categories correctly.

And it normally means that there is going to be

too much competition.

In one way or another.

And so I think almost all the successful companies

in Silicon Valley had some model of

starting with small markets and expanding.

And if you take Amazon, you start with.

Just a bookstore.

We have all the books in the world.

So it's a better bookstore than anybody else

has in the world.

When it's starts in the 90's, it's online,

there's things you can do you can't do before.

And then you gradually expand into all sorts of

different forms of e-commerce and

other things beyond that.

You know, eBay you start with Pez dispensers.

You move on to Beanie Babies and

eventually it's all these different auctions for

all these sorts of different goods.

And what was very counter intuitive about many of

these companies is they often start with

markets that are so small that people don't think

that they're valuable at all when you get started.

The PayPal version of this was, we started with

power sellers on eBay which was about 20,000 people.

When we first saw this happening in December of 99,

January of 2000 right after we launched,

there was a sense that these were all,

it was such a small market it was terrible.

We thought these were terrible customers to have.

It's just people selling junk on the internet.

Why in the world do we want to

be going after this market?

But, you know, there was a way to get a product that

was much better for everybody in that market.

You could, and we got to something like 25, 30%,

you know, market penetration in two or three months.

And you got some walk in.

You got brand recognition and

your able to build the business from there.

So I always think these,

these very small markets are quite underrated.

The Facebook version of this I always give is that you

know if the initial market of

Facebook was 10,000 people at Harvard, it went from

zero to sixty percent market share in ten days.

That was a very auspicious start.

The way this gets analyzed in business schools is

always, that's ridiculous,

it's such a small market it can't have any value at all.

And so, I think the business school analysis of

Facebook early on, or of PayPal early on, or

of eBay early on is that the markets were perhaps, so

small as to have, almost no value.

And they, they would have had little value had

they stayed small, but it turned out they were ways to

grow them concentrically and, that's what made them,

that's what made them so valuable.

Now I think the opposite version of this,

is always where you have super big markets.

And, and I, there's so much,

so many different things that went wrong with all

the clean tech companies in the last decade.

But, but, one,

one theme that ran through almost all of them,

was that they all started with massive markets.

And every clean tech PowerPoint presentation that

one saw in the years 2005 to 2008,

which was the clean tech bubble in Silicon Valley.

Started with, we're in the energy market,

we're in a market that's measured in hundreds of

billions of trillions of dollars.

And then once you're a minnow in a vast ocean.

That's not a good place to be.

That means that you have tons of competitors and

you don't even know who all the competitors are.

And so you want to be a one of a kind company,

where it's the only one in a small ecosystem.

You don't want to

be the fourth online pet food company.

You don't want to be

the tenth thin film solar panel company.

You don't want to be the 100th restaurant in

Palo Alto.

Your restaurant industry is a trillion dollar industry,

so if you do a market size analysis you conclude

restaurants are a fantastic business to go into, and

it's often, large markets, large existing markets

typically mean that you have tons of competition, very,

very hard to differentiate.

So the first very counterintuitive into a idea

is to go after small markets, often markets that

are so small people don't even notice them.

They don't think that they make sense.

That's where you got a foothold, and

then if those markets are able to expand,

you can scale into a big monopoly business.

You know, a second sort of, the sort of several

different characteristics of these monopoly businesses,

that I like to focus on.

There's probably no sort of single formula to it.

I also ways think that that in technology there

is always a sense that you know,

the history of technology is such that every.

Every moment happens only once, so you know the next

Mark Zuckerberg won't build a social network.

The next Larry Page won't be building a search engine.

The next Bill Gates won't be

building an operating system.

And if you're copying these people,

you're not learning from them.

But it's, and so,

there is always these very unique businesses that

are doing something that's not been done before,

end up, end of having the potential to be a monopoly.

The opening line in Anna Karenina that all

happy companies, sorry, all happy families.

All happy families are alike.

All unhappy families are unhappy in

their own special way.

And the opposite is true in business,

where I think all happy companies are different

because they're doing something very unique.

All unhappy companies are alike because they fail to

escape the essential sameness that

is competition, and so

one sort of characteristic of a monopoly technology

company is some sort of proprietary technology.

My sort of crazy, somewhat arbitrary,

rule of thumb is you want to have a technology that's

an order of magnitude better than the next best thing.

So Amazon had over ten times as many books,

maybe not that high tech, but you figure out a way to

sell ten times as many books in an efficient online way.

You know, PayPal, the alternative for

PayPal was using checks to send money on eBay,

took seven to ten days to clear.

PayPal could do it more than ten times as fast.

So you wanna have some sort of very

powerful improvement in some order, maybe an order of

magnitude improvement on some key dimension.

Of course, you know,

if you actually come with something totally new it's,

it's just, it's just like an infinite improvement.

So I would say the,

the iPhone was the first smartphone that worked and

so that's, you know that's like I mean,

I mean maybe not infinite, but

it's sort of definitely order of magnitude or

more of improvement.

So I think, the, the technology is designed to

give you a massive delta over, over the next,

the next best thing.

I think, I think there often are network effects that

can kick in that, really help.

The thing that's very, and these,

these lead to monopolies over time,

the thing that's very tricky about network effects is,

they're often.

They're often very hard to get started.

So even though everyone understands how

valuable they are, there is

always this incredibly tricky question why is it

valuable to the first person who is doing something?

Economies of scale, if you have something of

a very high fixed costs, very low marginal cost.

That's typically a monopoly like business.

And then there's this thing of branding.

Which is sort of like this idea that gets lodged in

people's brains.

I never quite understand how branding works, so I never

invest in companies where it's just about branding.

But it is, I think,

a real phenomenon that creates real value.

I think one of the things, I'm gonna come back to

this a little bit, towards the end.

But one of the things that's very striking,

is that software businesses are often, are, for

some reason, very good at some of these things.

They're especially good at the economies of scale part.

Because, the marginal cost of software is zero.

And so if you get something that works in software.

It's often significantly better

than the existing solution.

And then you have these tremendous economies of

scale, and you can scale fairly quickly.

So even if the market starts small,

you can grow your business quickly enough to stay at

the same size as the growing market.

And maintain the sort of monopoly power.

Now, the critical thing about these monopolies is,

it's not enough to have a monopoly for just a moment.

The critical thing is to

have one that lasts over time.

And so in Silicon Valley there's always this idea

that you wanna be the first mover.

And I, I always think it's, it's, in some ways,

the better framing is you wanna be the last mover, or

you wanna be the last company in a category.

Those are the ones that are really valid.

Microsoft was the last operating system,

at least for many decades.

Google is the last search engine.

Facebook will be valuable if it turns out to be the last,

social networking site.

One way to think of

this last mover of value is this idea that most of

the value in these companies exists far in the future.

If you do a discounted cash flow analysis of a business.

You look at, you have sort of all these profit streams.

You have a growth rate.

The growth rate's much higher than

the discount rate.

And so most of the value exists far in the future.

I did this exercise At PayPal in March of 2001.

We'd been in business for about 27 months.

And we sort of had, the growth rate was 100% a year.

We were discounting future cashflows by about 30%.

And it turned out that about three quarters of

the value of the business, as of 2001,

came from cash flows in years 2011 and beyond.

And whenever you do the math on any of these tech

companies, you get an answer that's something like that.

So if you are trying to analyze any other

tech companies in Silicon Valley, Arabian B, Twitter.

Facebook, any emerging internet companies,

any of the ones in Y-Combinator.

The math tells you that three quarters, 80,

85% of the value is coming from cash flows in

years 2024 and beyond.

It's very, very far in the future.

And, so one of the things that we always overvalue in

Silicon Valley is growth rates, and

we undervalue durability.

Because, growth is something you can measure in the here

and now, and you can always track that very precisely.

The question of whether a company's still gonna be

around a decade from now.

That's actually what,

what dominates the value equation and

that sort of is a much more qualitative sort of a thing.

And so if we, if we went back to this idea of these

characteristics of monopoly, proprietary technology,

network effects, economies of scale, You can think

of these characteristics as ones that exist at a moment

in time when you capture a market and take it over.

But you also want to think about,

are these things going to last over time.

And, so, there's a time

dimension to all these characteristics.

So, net worth effects also have a great time element,

where as the network scales the network

effects actually get more robust, and so

if you have a network effect business that's often one

that can become a bigger and stronger monopoly over time.

Proprietary technology is always a little bit of

a tricky one, so

you want something that's order magnitude better.

Than, the state of the art in the world today.

And that's how you get people's attention.

That's how you initially break through.

But then, you don't wanna be superseded by somebody else.

And so there are all these areas of innovation where,

there was tremendous innovation, but

no one made any money.

So, you know?

Describe manufacturing in the 1980's.

You could im-,

you could do a better disk,

build a better disk drive than anybody else.

You could take over the whole world.

And two years later someone else would come along and

replace yours.

And the course of 15 years,

you got vastly improved disk drives, so

it had great benefit to consumers, but it didn't

actually help the people who started these companies.

And so there's always this question about having a huge

breakthrough in technology, but then also being able to

say, explain why, yours will be the last breakthrough, or

at least the last breakthrough for

a long time, or when you make a breakthrough.

And then you can keep improving on it

at a quick enough pace that no one can ever catch up.

So, if you have a structure of structure of

the future where there's a lot of innovation and

other people will come up with new things in

the thing you're working on.

That's great for society.

It's actually not that good for

your business, typically.

And then economies of scale, we've already talked about.

So I think this last mover thing is very critical.

I'm always, you know,

I don't wanna overdo the chess analogies, but

the first mover in chess is someone who plays white.

White is about a 1/3 of a pawn advantage, so

there's a small advantage to going first.

You wanna be the last mover, who wins the game, so

there's always the, Capablanca world champion,

Capablanca must begin by studying the end game, and

I do think that's, while I wouldn't say that's the only

thing you should study.

I think the sort of perspective of

asking these questions, why will this still be

the leading company 10, 15, 20 years from now, is a,

is a really critical one to try to think through.

Let me, let me sort of,

I want to sort of go in two slightly other directions

with this monopoly vs competition idea.

And I think so I think this is the, the central idea,

in my mind for, for business for starting business for

thinking about them and there are some, interesting

perspectives I think it gives on the whole you know,

on the whole history of innovation and

technology and science.

Because, yeah we've, we've lived through,

250, 300 years of incredible technological progress in

you know many, many different domains.

You know, steam engine to railways to

telephones, refrigeration, household appliances,

you know the computer revolution, aviation.

All sorts of different areas of

technological innovation and then there's sort of

analogous thing that one can say about science,

where we've lived through centuries of enormous

amounts of innovation in science as well.

And the thing that I think people always miss when

they think about these things is that because X and

Y are independent variables, some of these things can be

extremely valuable innovations.

But the people who invent them,

who come up with them, do not get rewarded for this.

And certainly, you can go back to, you need to

create X dollars in value, you create Y percent of X.

I would suggest that the history of science has

generally been one where Y is 0% across the board.

The scientists never make any money.

They're always deluded into thinking that they live in

a just universe that will reward them for

their work and for their inventions.

And this is probably the fundamental delusion that

scientists tend to suffer from in our society.

And even in technology, there are, sort of,

many different areas of technology,

where there were great innovations that created

tremendous value for society.

But the people did not actually capture that much

of the value.

And so I think there is a sort of whole history of.

Science and

technology that can be told from the perspective of

how much value was actually captured.

And certainly, there are entire sectors where

people didn't capture anything.

So you're the smartest Physicist of the 20th

century, you come up with special relativity,

you come up with general relativity.

You don't get to be a billionaire,

you don't even get to be a millionaire.

It somehow doesn't work that way.

The railroads, incredibly valuable.

Most of them just went bankrupt,

because there was too much competition.

Wright brothers, you fly the first plane,

you don't make any money.

And so I think there is sort of a structure to

these industries, that's very important.

And I think the thing that's actually rare,

are the success cases.

Most the, so it's actually unique when you really think

about the history in this, in this 250 year sweep,

it's unusual, Y is almost always zero percent.

It's always zero in science.

It's almost always in technology, and

so it's very rare where people made money.

You know, the early,

the late 18th, early 19th century, the first

industrial revolution was textile mills, steam engine,

the sort of automated things.

And you had these relentless improvements,

that people improved efficiency of

textile factories, manufacturing generally.

At a clip of 5 to 7% every year.

Year after year, decade after decade.

You had 60, 70 years of

tremendous improvement from 1780 to 1850.

But even in 1850, most of the wealth in Britain

was still held by the landed aristocracy.

The workers didn't, you know,

the workers didn't make that much,

the capitalists didn't make that much either.

It was all competed away.

There were hundreds of

people running textiles factories.

It was an industry that just,

the structure of the competition prevented people

from making any money.

And so I think there are, in my mind,

there probably are only two broad categories in

the entire history, the last 250 years,

where people have actually come up with new things, and

made money doing so.

One is these sort of vertically integrated

complex monopolies which people did build in

the second industrial revolution at the end of

the 19th and started the 20th century.

And so this was like Ford, it was the vertically

integrated oil companies like Standard Oil.

And what these vertically integrated monopolies

typically required was this very complex coordination.

You've got a lot of pieces to fit together in

just the right way, when you assembled it,

you had a tremendous advantage.

This is actually done surprisingly little today.

And so I think this is sort of a business form that

when people can pull it off is very valuable.

It's typically fairly capital intensive.

We live sort of in a, in a culture where is very hard

to get people to buy into anything that's super

complicated, and it takes very long to build.

But I, you know,

when I sort of think about my colleague Elon Musk

from PayPal success with Tesla and Space X, I think

the key to these companies was the complex vertically

integrated monopoly structure they had.

So if you sort of look at Tesla or Space X you ask,

you know, was there sort of single breakthrough?

They certainly innovated on a lot of dimensions.

I don't think there was

a single tennex breakthrough and battery storage,

or you know, maybe working on some things in rocketry.

But they hadn't,

there was no sort of single massive breakthrough, but

what was really impressive was integrating all these

pieces together, and doing it in a way that was more

vertically integrated than most of their competitors.

So, Tesla,

you also integrated the car distributors, so

they wouldn't steal all the money, as has happened with

the rest of the car industry in the US.

Or SpaceX, you basically pulled in

all the subcontractors where most of the large aerospace

companies have single source subcontractors that are able

to sort of charge monopoly profits, and

make it very hard for

the integrated aerospace companies to make money.

And so vertical integration I think is sort of a very

under explored modality of technological progress,

that people would do well to look at more.

And then I think there is, there is something about

software itself that's very, very powerful.

Software has these incredible economies of

scale, these low marginal costs and there is something

about the world of bits, as opposed to the world of

adams, where you can often get very fast adoption.

And, and the fast adoption is critical to capturing and

taking over markets because even if you

have a small market if the adoption rate is too slow,

there'll be enough time for other people to

enter that market, and compete with you.

Whereas if you have a small to mid size market, and

have a fast adoption rate.

You cannot take over this market.

And so I think this is

one of the reasons Silicon Valley has done so well, and

why software has been this phenomenal industry.

And what I, what I would suggest, what I would want

to leave you with is there are sort of these different

rationalizations people give for why certain things work,

and why certain things don't work.

And I think these rationalizations always

obscure this question of creating X dollars in value,

and capturing Y percent of X.

So the science rationalization we're

always told, is that

the scientists aren't interested in making money.

They're doing it for

charitable reasons, and that you're not

a good scientist if you're motivated by money.

And I'm not even saying people should

always be motivated by money or something like this.

But I think we should be a little more critical of this

as a rationalization.

We should ask, is this a rationalization

to obscure the fact that Y equals zero percent.

And the scientists are operating in this sort of

world where all the innovation is

effectively competed away, and

they can't capture any of it directly.

The software distortion that often happens,

is because people are making such a vast fortunes in

software, we infer that this is the most

valuable thing in the world being done full stop.

And so if people at Twitter make billions of dollars,

it must be that Twitter is worth far more than anything

that Einstein did.

What that sort of rationalization tends to

obscure, is again that X and Y are independent variables.

And there are these businesses where you

capture a lot of X and there others where you don't.

And so, I do think the history of innovation has

been this history where the microeconomics,

the structure of these industries has mattered

a tremendous amount.

And when there is sort of this

story where some people have made vast fortunes, because

they were in industries with the right structure, and

other people made nothing at all, because they were in

these sort of very competitive things.

And we shouldn't just rationalize that away,

I think it's worth understanding this better.

And then finally, let me come back to this

sort of overarching theme for

this talk, this competition is for losers idea.

Which is always a provocative way to

title things, because we always think of

the losers as the people who are not good at competing.

We think of the losers as the people who are slow on

the sports team, on the track team in high school,

or who do a little bit less well on the standardized

tests, and don't get into the right schools.

So we always think of losers as people who can't compete,

and I want us to really rethink,

and revalue this and consider whether it's

possible that competition itself is off.

That we've sort of, it's not just the case and

we don't understand this

monopoly competition dichotomy intellectually.

So that's, sort of,

why you wouldn't understand intellectually,

because people lie about it.

It's distorted.

We have all these history of innovation

rationalizes what's happening in all these very,

very strange ways.

But I think it's more than just an intellectual blind

spot, I think it's also a psychological blind spot

where we find ourselves, you know, very attracted to

competition in one form or another.

We find it reassuring if other people do things.

The word ape, already in the time of Shakespeare,

meant both primate and imitate.

And there is

something about human nature that's deeply mimetic.

Imitative.

Apelike, sheeplike, lemminglike, herdlike.

And it's this very problematic thing that we

need to always think through and try to overcome.

And there is always this question about

competition as a form of validation.

Where we go for

things that lots of other people are going for,

and it's not that there is wisdom in crowds, it's

not when lots of people are trying to do something that,

that's proof of it being valuable.

I think it's when lots of people are trying to do

something that is often proof of insanity.

There are twenty thousand people a year who move to

Los Angeles to become movie stars,

about 20 of them make it.

I think the Olympics are a little bit better,

because you can figure out pretty quickly whether

you're good or not, so there's a little bit less of

a dead weight loss to society.

You know?

>> You the sort of educational experience at

a place, the pre Stanford educational experience.

There's always sort of

a non-competitive characterization, where I

think most of the people in this room had machine guns,

that were competing with people with bows and arrows.

So it wasn't exactly a parallel competition when

you were in junior high school and high school.

There's always a question,

does the tournament make sense as you keep going?

And there is always this question if people go on to

grad school, or

post doctoral educations, does the intensity of

the competition really make sense?

There's the classic Henry Kissinger line

describing his fellow faculty at Harvard.

That the battles were so

ferocious, because the stakes were so small.

Describing sort of academia.

And you start to think on one level this is

a description of insanity.

Why would people fight like crazy when the stakes are so

small?

But it's also,

I think simply a function of the logic of the situation.

When it's really hard to differentiate yourself from

other people.

When the differences are, when

the objective differences really are small.

Then you have to compete ferociously to maintain

a difference of one sort or

another, that's often more imaginary than real.

There's always a sort of a personal version of

this that I tell where I was sort of hyper tracked.

My 8th grade junior high school yearbook,

one of my friends wrote in,

I know you'll get into Stanford in four years

as a Sophomore, sort of when it is going to Stanford four

years later, the end of high school.

Went to Stanford Law School.

You know, ended up at a big law firm in New York,

where from the outside everybody wanted to get in.

On the inside everybody wanted to leave.

>> And it was this very strange dynamic, where after

I sort of realized that this was not the best idea,

and left after seven months and three days.

You know, one of the people down the hall from me told

me, it's really reassuring to see you leave, Peter.

I had no idea that it was possible to

escape from Alcatraz.

Which of course, all you had to do was go out the front

door and not come back.

But so much of people identities got

wrapped in winning these competitions,

that they somehow lost site of what was important.

What was valuable.

And you know, competition does make you better

at whatever it is you're competing on.

Because when you're competing,

you're comparing yourself with the people around you.

You're figuring out,

how do I beat the people next to me?

How do I do somewhat better at whatever it

is they're doing.

And you will get better at that thing.

I'm not questioning that, I'm not denying that.

But, it often comes at this tremendous price that you

stop asking some bigger questions,

about what's truly important and truly valuable.

And so I would say, don't always go through the tiny

little door that everyone's trying to rush through.

Maybe go around the corner, and

go through the vast gate that no one's taking.

Thank you very much.

I guess there's time for,

do you want to take a few questions?

>> Sorry?

>> Oh yes, people want to take,

I'll take a few questions with few minutes time.

Yeah, go ahead.

>> Since, yeah, as you mentioned,

you already mentioned further competition often

look similar because the narrative of

people tell our selves.

Do you have any ways to

easily determine the difference when your

looking at an idea that is better than your own idea?

>> Well I'd say the question I always try to focus on is

what is the actual market?

So not what's the narrative of the market,

because you can always tell a fictional story about

a market that's much bigger or much smaller.

But what is the real objective market?

So, it's always, yeah, you always try to figure it out.

And you realize people have

incentives to powerfully distort these things.

Yeah?

>> Which of the aspects of monopolies that you

mentioned would you say >> Well

they have network effects with the ad network.

They had proprietary technology that gave them

the initial lead, because they had the page

rank algorithm which was sort of, an order of

magnitude better than any other search engine.

You have economies of scale,

because of the need to store all these different sites.

And at this point, you have brand, so

Google has all four.

Maybe the proprietary technology's somewhat

weaker at this point.

But, definitely, it had all four, and

maybe three out of four now.

Yeah.

>> How does this apply to and, second, what's it like.

The seconds what?

>> What's with the i-Phone? >> That's

sort of a set of companies that are doing

different copycat payment systems on mobile phones.

There's Square, there's PayPal.

They just have sort of different shapes.

That's how they differentiate themselves.

One is a triangle, one is a square.

And so you know...

>> Maybe at some point the apes weren't out of shape or

something like that.

But I think, pounds here we started with focus on

the intelligence community which is small sub-market,

you had a proprietary technology that used

a very different approach.

Were it was focused on the human

computer synthesis rather than the substitution,

which I think is the dominant paradigm.

So there's a whole set of things I would say on

the market approach, and on the proprietary technology.

Yes?

>> When you have design thinking methodology in

a start-up thinking, which is used to mitigate risk by

not creating things that people don't want.

But I think young innovators have inspiration create

complex systems that last's through time.

>> Could you repeat the question?

>> Yeah. So the quest is what do I

think about lean start-up's, iterative thinking,

where you get feedback from people,

versus complexity that may not work.

So, I am personally quite skeptical of all the lean

start-up methodology.

I think the really great companies did something that

was, sort of.

Somewhat more of a quantum improvement that

really differentiated them from everybody else.

They typically did not do massive, you know,

customer surveys.

The people who ran these companies sometimes,

not always, suffer from mild forms of Aspberger's, so

they were not actually that influenced,

not that easily deterred by what other people thought or

told them to do.

So I do think we're way too focused on iteration as

a modality, and not enough on trying to have a virtual

esp link with the public and figuring it out ourselves.

I would say that, the risk question

is always a very tricky one because there are, you know?

They're, they're, it's not, it's often.

I think it's often the case that you

don't have enough time to really mitigate risk.

If, if you're gonna take enough time to

figure out what people want.

You often will have missed the boat by then.

and, and then, of course, there's always the risk of,

of doing something that's, that's not that,

significant or meaningful.

So, you know? You could say a track in

law school is a low risk track from one

perspective, it may still be a very high risk track in

the sense that maybe your not, have a high risk of

not doing something meaningful with your life.

So, we have to think about risk in these,

very complicated way.

I think risk is for a very complicated concept.

Yes. I was just checking for

the last advantage, but then doesn't that

imply that there's already competition to begin with

between the chess pieces on the chess board?

>> Yeah, so, there's always this terminology thing,

so I would say that there are categories in

which people sort of are bundled together.

I would say the monopoly businesses were in effect

they really were a big first mover in some sense.

You could say Google was not the first search engine.

There were other search engines before, but

on one dimension,

they were dramatically better than everybody else,

they were the first one with page rank,

with sort of an automated approach.

Facebook was not the first social networking site.

My friend, Reed Hoffman, started one in 1997,

and they called it Social Net.

So they already had the name,

Social networking, in the name of their company,

seven years before Facebook.

Their idea was that it was gonna be this virtual

cyberspace, where I'd be a dog and you'd be a cat.

And we'd have all these different rules about how

we'd interact with each other.

>> In this virtual alternate reality.

Facebook was the first one to get real identity.

So, it was, so I would say,

I hope Facebook will be the last social networking site,

it was the first one in a very important dimension.

People often would not think of it as the first because

they, sort of, lump all these things together.

>> I have one more question.

>> Okay, one question, let's take one here.

>> If you're theoretically someone who,

worked at Golden College and left there after six months,

and is now going to do science at Standford.

How would you recommend rethinking

>> I don't have a great,

I'm not great at the psychotherapy stuff so

I don't quite know how to >> solve this.

There are these very odd studies they've

done on people who go to business school.

There's one they've done at Harvard Business school

where it's sort of the anti-Asperger, personality.

We have people who are super extroverted,

generally have low convictions, few ideas.

And you have sort of a hothouse environment.

You put all these people in for two years.

And at the end of it, they systematically end up,

the largest cohort systematically ends up

doing the wrong thing.

They tried to catch the last wave.

You know in 1989 everyone in Harvard tried to work for

Mike Milken, it was one or

two years before he went to jail for

all the junk bond stuff.

They were never interested in Silicon Valley or

tech, except for '99 and 2000 when they timed the dot

com bubble peaking perfectly.

They did, and then '05 to '07 was housing.

Private equity, stuff like this.

I do think this tendency for

us to see competition as validation is very deep.

I don't think there's any sort of

easy psychological formula to avoid it.

I don't know what sort of therapy to recommend.

>> But my first.

My first starting point,

which is only like maybe ten percent of the way,

is to never under estimate how big a problem it is.

We always think this is

something that afflicts other people.

It's easy for

me to point to people in business schools or people

at Harvard or people on Wall Street, I think it actually

does afflict all of us to a very profound degree.

We always think of advertising as

things that work on other people.

How, who are all these stupid people who fall for

all those ads on tv,

they obviously work to some extent and

they work, to a disturbing extant on all of us.

And it's something we, we all should work to overcome.

Thank you very much.