“The things that I’ve found to be really compelling investments… are the ones where the idea is actually relatively narrow and the entrepreneur is really focused on doing something exceptionally well, but they’re doing this in a market that has just enormous potential.”

One of Max’s more successful investment was Yelp, and Yelp’s initial ambition was to “just make an awesome local review site for San Francisco.”

At the time, Max’s friends thought it was a “whacky” investment. San Francisco had fewer than a million people, and the founders were throwing local parties and renting out bars to get people to use it—surely that wouldn’t scale.

“Five years later, they are an international juggernaut just nailing it with their local review service. They were able to figure out the exact formula in San Francisco and replicated it everywhere else in the world.”

Video source: The Commonwealth Club of California “Max Levchin and Peter Thiel: Smart Venture Capital in 2011”