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Peter Thiel on what he would look for if he was joining a startup

January 02, 2024

In the clip below, Wharton professor Adam Grant asks Peter Thiel what he would look for if he was joining an early-stage startup. Thiel gives a simple response:

“Do you like the people? Do you think you could become good friends with these people? That’s such a critical part for getting these things to work.”

He recalls interviewing with a law firm in New York early in his career and one partner telling him:

“It’s a place where everybody hates everybody else, but we all make lots of money.”

The partner viewed it as an illustration of how incredibly “professional” the firm was. But Thiel argues that we need more than just “professional” at work.

In his book Zero to One he writes:

“Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other? Many seem to think it’s a sacrifice necessary for making money. But taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: it’s not even rational. Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your time well—even in purely financial terms.”