PS: I haven’t been active on this blog for a while due to life events, will try to post semi-regularly now :)
A friend once asked me why i read books, most of what we read is not retained in our brains once we finish the book. I wholeheartedly agree.
Then why read? Because even if the book invokes 5 (Good) or 10 (Excellent) thoughts in your head that you can reflect on, use in your career or personal life, then it is worth it.
Movies or Audio does not have the impact that words seared in your brain do.
With that, on to regular programming.
My 10 takeaways from the wonderful and sometimes shocking discourse from Peter Thiel:
- Make concentrated bets
- 99% people should not do startups unless they figure out what they are really good at relative to others.
- Does your idea have exponential value to improve society or is it only incremental?
- Focus on dominating a small niche market of concentrated buyers before thinking of scaling.
- Branding comes later, focus on your core business / technology first.
- Definite optimism is better than indefinite pessimism
- Indefinite optimism is worse because it gives people hope without any actionable plan for the future (We all suffer from this don’t we!)
- Choose your cofounders wisely, solo entrepreneurship cannot achieve 0 to 1 success
- Selling is not a bad word, anyone who has ever succeeded in business, art, politics or culture has sold his or her idea to the world.
- The most valuable businesses in the next 50 years will be built on empowering people, not making them obsolete. (Resonates with the AI debates we have been having off late)
