PETER THIEL'S STOCK PORTFOLIO HAS BEEN UPDATED This is what Peter Thiel's portfolio of public companies looked like as of the end of Q2 - Amazon $AMZN: 495,000 shares, $118.0M - Vista Energy $VIST: 1,189,792 shares, $75.9M - Vistra $VST: 372,755 shares, $59.1M - FirstEnergy $FE: 839,319 shares, $39.9M - DTE Energy $DTE: 264,450 shares, $40.3M - American Electric Power $AEP: 308,617 shares, $42.2M - CMS Energy $CMS: 517,124 shares, $39.6M - X-Energy: 200,000 shares, $3.7M

Peter Thiel on the type of company more startup founders should build Thiel first emphasizes his belief that when starting a company, you should always ask: “Can this company become a monopoly?” He then lists three of the most common types of monopolies: Super fast distribution on a very thin product (e.g. Twitter) A technological advantage that is continually built upon with iterative improvement and compounds over time (e.g. SaaS software) A truly brilliant breakthrough (e.g. Bitcoin) But he argues that there’s a different monopoly category that’s continually overlooked: “A different modality for innovation that we do very little of and we don’t even recognize as an important category is what I would describe as ‘Complex Coordination,’ where you take a lot of different pieces and the challenge is to coordinate them into something new.” Thiel continues: “This is the thing that’s maybe 180 degrees antithetical to the Lean Startup ethos. It’s complicated. You have to put all the pieces together in just the right way. I think this is on some level what really drove Apple as an innovative company in the last decade… What was new about the iPhone? There was no single component that was new. It was just that you put all of these things together in just the right way… and once you built it, it was actually super hard for people to replicate. You had an advantage for many years.” He points to Tesla and SpaceX as more recent examples. “There’s no component to the Tesla that’s actually that new. It’s just that you put all of the pieces together. You re-engineered the whole distributor network. It was this complex coordination that made it work. There’s like this lost art of accounting where you figure out how much things cost and add them all together. And Elon has discovered this lost art of accounting which no other people practice.”

Peter Thiel on the question he asks every startup founder he invests in “Why will the 20th talented person join your company when they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google, and it will look better on their resume to go to Google?” The 20th employee won’t get the equity or prestige that someone on the founding team will get, so there needs to be another incentive if you’re going to build a truly great company and attract the best people in the world. Thiel believes the best answer is something along the lines of: “This is the only place in the world where you can work on this incredibly important problem.” He continues: “It has to—on some dimension—be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kind of businesses that are unique, and when they work, they end up being leaders in their respective markets.” If it’s a problem that a bunch of other team are working on, it will be hard to attract a truly world-class employee #20#.