Peter Thiel on how to identify great talent

November 18, 2024

Peter Thiel is famous for discovering undervalued talent throughout his career. The most well-known example is PayPal, where he recruited people who went on to start companies like YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Affirm, and Yammer. But he also recruited Alex Karp, his former classmate at Stanford Law School, to co-found Palantir with him 2003.

Tyler Cowen asks Thiel what traits he looks for in undiscovered talent that everyone else overlooks. Thiel replies:

“It’s very difficult to reduce it to any single trait. A lot of what you’re looking for are these almost zen-like opposites.”

He gives a few examples:

“You want people who are both really stubborn and really open-minded. That’s a little contradictory. You want people who are sort of really idiosyncratic and really different, but then who can work well together in teams… If you focus too much on one end of it, you tend to get it completely wrong… [I like to look for] these combinations of unusual traits.”

Essentially he looks for idiosyncratic people with combinations of unusual traits that counterbalance those idiosyncrasies.

Peter Thiel on the importance of pitching your startup as a “discount to the future” “The value is never a premium on the past. It’s always a discount to the future. I think the way one should always try to pitch the value of a company is by explaining why it will be worth a lot more in the future and why investors are getting to invest at a point that it’s a lot cheaper.” (full article).

Peter Thiel: “Steve Jobs probably gets too little credit” “There are probably ways in which he gets too little credit… The founders of these companies are not divine beings - they’re not omnipotent, omniscient, or anything like that… But I think the importance of a charismatic leader who can bring out the best in people in something that is very underestimated.” (full article).

Peter Thiel: “The one technology I’m marginally nervous about is generalized AI” “If you could build AI that was smarter than humans in every dimension, my intuition is there would be something kind of scary about it. It’s probably the one area I’d be nervous about funding.” (full article).

p.s. In case you missed it, there was a new essay in The Founders’ Tribune yesterday: How to be Elon Musk by Justine Musk