Peter Thiel on why complex coordination is a company category that's continually underestimated

In the clip below, Peter Thiel explains why he believes “complex coordination” is a company category that’s continually underestimated.

“The question we always focus on is ‘can this company become a monopoly?’”

He then lists several things that can make a company a monopoly:

1. Super fast distribution on a very thin product (e.g. Twitter)

2. A technological advantage that is continually built upon: you come up with something new and steadily improve (e.g. enterprise SaaS software)

3. A truly brilliant breakthrough (e.g. Bitcoin)

However he argues that complex coordination—where you take a lot of little pieces and coordinate them into something new—is continually overlooked as a way to create a monopoly:

“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. You could get network lock in—in terms of the app community or the brand.”

He also points to Tesla and SpaceX as 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.”

Full video: General Assembly “Zero to One: A Discussion with Peter Thiel” (Feb 2015)