Startup insights from Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Dalton Caldwell, Bill Carr, and Tony Fadell

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Today’s insights:

1. Peter Thiel explains his principle of only working on problems that wouldn’t get solved without you

2. Reid Hoffman describes the two years of building LinkedIn where it looked like they would fail

3. YC Partner Dalton Caldwell: “Growth hacking is a total waste of time for very early startups”

4. Former Amazon Executive Bill Carr explains the “bar-raiser” hiring process

5. iPhone co-creator Tony Fadell: “Data does not equal insights”

Peter Thiel explains his principle of only working on problems that wouldn’t get solved without you

Thiel shares that he’s “a little bit skeptical” of social entrepreneurship:

“Social entrepreneurship is always ambiguous because it’s unclear what the word ‘social’ means. Social can mean that it’s ‘good for society’ or it can mean that it’s ‘good as seen by society’. In the second meaning, you often end up with something that many people are doing.”

He gives education startups as an example of a social startup - it’s seen as objectively good and lots of people are working on it.

Thiel contrasts this to a mission-oriented company:

“A mission-oriented company is one where if you didn’t work on this problem, nobody would.”

He gives the example of Elon Musk starting SpaceX with the mission of going to Mars and making humans interplanetary. If Elon wasn’t working on it, this problem might not get solved.

Thiel believes this is an important principle in general:

“We always want to do things where… if you weren’t working on it, it wouldn’t get solved. Always go for that sort of counterfactual meaning. You don’t want to ever be in a place where you’re just one of a hundred cogs in the machine… You want to be in a place where you’re doing something that can’t be easily replicated or replaced - either on an individual level or the level of a company.”

Full video: WhartonLeadership “Authors@Wharton Speaker Series presents Peter Thiel“ (Oct 2014)

Reid Hoffman describes the two years of building LinkedIn where it looked like they would fail

“When we launched LinkedIn, we hoped it would just work.”

But in their first eight weeks, they were only signing up roughly 2,000 people per week.

“Roughly speaking we probably could’ve gotten that many signups if what we’d done is taken a phone book and had everyone in the company calling people saying, ‘please sign up!’… That was about the rate. That’s not going to work. That’s death. We knew we had to solve our growth problem.”

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