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.”

Justine Musk on being married to Elon Musk what it means to a visionary In her TED Talk “Visionaries are People Who Can See In The Dark”, Justine Musk shares her experience reading a recent profile Elon: “He’s quoted as saying something to a friend — and this happened during the time we were still married together… He said that he was prepared to sacrifice his entire fortune to get a rocket into orbit. And he said, ‘I don’t care if Justine and the kids and I end up living in Justine’s parents’ basement. I’m going to make this happen.’ And so I read this and kind of wanted to go back in time, go up to him, take him by the shoulders, look him very seriously in the eyes, and say, ‘Have you seen my parents’ basement?’” Justine reflects what it means to be a visionary: “Visionaries take all that passion, their badass personalities, their mad skills, and the mastery of their chosen subject matter, and they use it to put themselves on the line unlike anybody else you’ll ever meet. And it’s this that allows them to open up windows into another, deeper reality in which transformation is possible and things of awe happen on a regular basis.” She continues: “In the beginning, we don’t trust them because we think they’re crazy, but by the end, we trust them because we know they’re crazy. They’re crazy enough to accomplish anything and risk it all in order to bring us something new to believe in. They might make lousy husbands and terrible wives. They might be the friend who never sends you a birthday present and forgets to show up for coffee. But they bring light to the dark, and they show us the universe.” Source: @TEDTalks (Jun 2017)

Ben Horowitz: “Do not expect life to be fair. It will only defeat you.” The Andreessen Horowitz co-founder is asked for advice that he has found useful in his own life. Ben responds: “The thing that I would say has had the biggest effect on me is something my father said to me years ago: ‘Life isn’t fair.’ That advice seems really simple, but the thing I’ve seen that defeats people more than any other thing in life is the expectation of some fairness.” He continues: “There are all kinds of things that are going to happen to you that don’t happen to other people and are completely unfair. But it doesn’t matter because that’s the way it is. And as soon as you can get that idea out of your mind [that life should be fair], you can just deal with it… ‘What should I do now?’ is the real question — not ‘How do I go back and get people to be fair?’… Life’s not fair. That’s the nature of it. If you think about it more than five seconds, you’ll realize that… As an individual, do not expect anything to be fair. It will only defeat you.” Source: @lennysan (Sep 2025)

Replit CEO Amjad Masad on the “most gangster story in Silicon Valley” In September 2021, Replit founder Amjad Masad tweeted: “The most gangster story in Silicon Valley is Steve Jobs buying Pixar for $5m, investing $50m, operating at a loss for a decade — so much so he had to cut personal checks every month to make payroll and somehow turning it around to exit for $7B to Disney.” He expands on this in his interview on the My First Million podcast: “The thing I like about the Steve Jobs story is when he was lost in the desert for 10 years. He was fired from Apple, and then he created two companies that were failing the whole time. NeXT Computer and Pixar were literally failing, and he was investing more and more of his own money. At that pace he was going to go broke, but he kept going for 10 years. How do you do that?” Eventually the success of Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film, helped make Pixar’s 1995 IPO one of the the most successful of the decade. And Apple used the NeXt operating system as the foundation for macOS. But both ventures took the better part of 10 years. Interestingly, the 12 “wilderness years” between getting fired at Apple and coming back was the most pivotal period of Steve Jobs’s life. His work with Pixar and NeXT helped him grow into the leader capable of taking Apple to unimaginable heights when he returned. Source: @myfirstmilpod @amasad (Dec 2024)

Jeff Bezos: The founder’s job is to build a “heavy” company Jeff Bezos recalls how Amazon’s stock price fell from $113 to $6 when the Internet bubble burst. “Shareholders were upset; employees were nervous; their parents were calling our employees and asking if they were ok,” Jeff remembers. “This was an environment of great nervousness. But I looked at the numbers in the business and every month — as the stock price went from $113 to $6 — our number of customers went up, our gross profits went up, and our losses as a % of sales went down. Every single business metric we were monitoring for that entire period (new customers, repeat purchases, etc.) kept getting better.” He offers founders the following advice: “As entrepreneurs, you’re focused on the fundamentals of the business. The stock price is an ultimate output that you have very little control over. The great investor Benjamin Graham is famous for saying that the stock market is a voting machine in the short run but a weighing machine in the long run. As founders, entrepreneurs, and business people, our job is to build a heavy company. We want to build a company that when it is weighed, it is a very heavy company. We do not want to focus on the stock price. That would be misleading because [the stock price] can be disconnected from the fundamentals.” Source: @Reuters (Oct 2025)

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#.

Jensen Huang: “Money is the only singular reason not to start a company“ “Money is the only singular reason not to start a company. Because starting a company has a very low probability of success. And so if that is your reason for doing it, you will likely regret the experience… You should build a company because you believe in your idea, you’re passionate about it, and you want to build something great… You have to have a perspective that’s unique and that you feel really strongly about, so you’re willing to persevere almost any challenge to make it happen.” Source: @Stanford Jun (2011)