6 ms·

Startups are not the one and be all goal of everyone's life. It is the goal of Theil's investments.

roenxi 3y ago
If there are people who could be adding a billion dollars in value to their society and choose not to... that would be worth reforming a lot of things to improve on. At the end of the day there is a lot of meat behind a real unicorn company. It is possible to do more for humanity than a billion dollar company - names like Gauss and Euler sprint to mind - but such names are rare.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  That's an interesting perspective. Economy above happiness. Economy above family. Economy above art. Economy above health. Economy above everything else.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  >At the end of the day there is a lot of meat behind a real unicorn company. It is possible to do more for humanity than a billion dollar company - names like Gauss and Euler sprint to mind - but such names are rare. Are they? I notice you only picked mathematicians. What's the value to society of a Mozart, a Picasso, a Dostoevsky, a Michelangelo ... ?
  - prepend 3y ago
    Massive value. But I think those are also arguments against college as it’s not like the goal of college is to produce those. And of course it’s very difficult to evaluate the impact along these types of values. Saying college is good because Mozart is valuable and not STEM seems like a reach.
- preciousoo 3y ago
  What an interesting way to see the world.
- pegasus 3y ago
  This assumes that the more money a company makes, the more beneficial it is to society. Seems dubious to me. For example, there's a case to be made that the large social media companies are doing irreparable harm to our societies. In which case, even the most unproductive citizen does way more for humanity than those "unicorns" do.
- jchanimal 3y ago
  As a guy whose startup is listed on NASDAQ I’m not sure I agree. Is cool that there’s a sustainable team dedicated to keeping my dream alive, and when things go well (eg airlines and supply chain running smoothly) it’s nice to take some credit. But in tens of impact it’s the open source users etc that I think of first, they aren’t really correlated to the billion dollars part.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  I don't agree with this at all. First, I don't think that society is best when optimizing for adding as many dollars of value to society as possible. This is easy to measure, but there are a great many other incredibly valuable things that don't involve large visible changes in the economy. Second, I don't think that unicorn startups are necessarily providing economic value to society. A company can become worth an absolute mountain of money while making society materially worse.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    > This is easy to measure, but there are a great many other incredibly valuable things that don't involve large visible changes in the economy. Technically there is still an implicit money transfer in those cases, it's just the debt is settled immediately. Remember, money is an IOU – used when you promise to give something that you cannot deliver on right now. Business seeks to deliver value at a scale that would make it impractical for all the debts to be settled in the moment, thus money (promises owed to the business) does become a reasonable measure of how well it is scaling. Things that are incredibly valuable to society do benefit from being scaled up to provide that benefit to more and more people. > A company can become worth an absolute mountain of money while making society materially worse. No company becomes worth mountains of money without making society better in some way. Every act comes with negative externalities, of course.
    - UncleMeat 3y ago
      > No company becomes worth mountains of money without making society better in some way. A pharmaceutical company that concludes that they can increase the price of their drug by 10x and only lose 3/4 of the sales is going to be a more valuable company. It will have increased revenue and profit and that will be reflected in its stock price. This decision makes the world materially worse. It only looks like an improvement when we measure based on revenue and profit rather than the amount of health improvement that the business provides to the world.
      - randomdata 3y ago
- thfuran 3y ago
  >If there are people who could be adding a billion dollars in value to their society and choose not to It isn't generating value that makes a company valuable, it's capturing it. You can generate value for society without earning a cent.
- dartos 3y ago
  What makes a “real” unicorn? There was a time where FTX, Theranos, and WeWork were all unicorns and none of them had real “meat.” Uber is/was a unicorn and the gig economy has proven awful for society. (Underpay what amount to employees while giving them no benefits or recourse and at the same time destroying taxi companies that did) Facebook was also a unicorn… I think billion dollar companies that “do more” (eg. be a net good) for humanity are as rare as individuals who do, especially if they are profit driven.
  - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
    Uber decreased US road fatalities by 4% and alcohol-related traffic deaths by 6%. https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/study-ride-sharing-apps-led-to-6-drop-in-alcohol-related-traffic-fatalities/ https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/study-ride-shari...
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      If they get credit for this, do they bear some partial responsibility if it goes up due to their significant price hikes over the past few years too?
      - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
        Even more interesting to think about: if so, then do governments like Germany, which have severely restricted Uber, bear any responsibility for the lives not saved from alcohol-related traffic fatalities?
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  >could be adding a billion dollars in value to their society Lets be real, I'm sure many of people here have jobs where they have to insist this is true, but that billion number is inflated nonsense. Most startups are not adding that much value to society. Maybe finding a way to middle-man extract that from society, yeah, but not adding it.
gizmo 3y ago
No look, the point is that people widely lampooned Peter Thiel for encouraging smart and ambitious students to drop out. So many people predicted this was guaranteed to fail. And the Thiel Fellowships have been a resounding success. I was one of those people who didn't think Thiel Fellows would accomplish much and I was wrong.
- CogitoCogito 3y ago
  Has it actually accomplished much for the fellows? A few posts up /u/prepend wrote this: > and does not match the success of Thiel’s programs for generating successful startups (11/900 is a pretty amazing success rate) That may be an amazing success rate for generating startups, but it would also mean that 98.8% of the startups weren't successful. Was dropping out actually good for the fellows aside from a few? Couldn't many argue that for most of these "smart and ambitious" students it really did fail? I'm not really taking a position here because I don't think failure alone means something wasn't worth it. Also I haven't followed Thiel's program that much so can't speak to the specifics. But given the numbers in this thread, I certainly wouldn't recommend students drop out.
  - prepend 3y ago
    That’s 11 multibillion startups. Not that everyone else was a failure. Although even it meant 11 unicorns out of 900 and the rest were zero, those are amazing odds that many would gamble 1-2 years of their life on. Especially at 20. But the article talks about how the others were also successful, just not multi-billion dollar company successful.
    - CogitoCogito 3y ago
      I’d be curious of the median (as well as other quantiles) earnings (less university costs) say over 10 years for the individuals involved compared to peers that didn’t drop out. Obviously this isn’t the sort of information that’s easy to obtain. But without it I don’t share your rosy outlook on the program. It seems to me like this easily could be a net negative for most of the students engaging in it.
prepend 3y ago
I agree. But with all the diverse elite institutions, many of them are focusing on startups, there should be some with higher success rates.

If there are people who could be adding a billion dollars in value to their society and choose not to... that would be worth reforming a lot of things to improve on. At the end of the day there is a lot of meat behind a real unicorn company. It is possible to do more for humanity than a billion dollar company - names like Gauss and Euler sprint to mind - but such names are rare.

marcinzm 3y ago
That's an interesting perspective. Economy above happiness. Economy above family. Economy above art. Economy above health. Economy above everything else.
NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
>At the end of the day there is a lot of meat behind a real unicorn company. It is possible to do more for humanity than a billion dollar company - names like Gauss and Euler sprint to mind - but such names are rare. Are they? I notice you only picked mathematicians. What's the value to society of a Mozart, a Picasso, a Dostoevsky, a Michelangelo ... ?
- prepend 3y ago
  Massive value. But I think those are also arguments against college as it’s not like the goal of college is to produce those. And of course it’s very difficult to evaluate the impact along these types of values. Saying college is good because Mozart is valuable and not STEM seems like a reach.
preciousoo 3y ago
What an interesting way to see the world.
pegasus 3y ago
This assumes that the more money a company makes, the more beneficial it is to society. Seems dubious to me. For example, there's a case to be made that the large social media companies are doing irreparable harm to our societies. In which case, even the most unproductive citizen does way more for humanity than those "unicorns" do.
jchanimal 3y ago
As a guy whose startup is listed on NASDAQ I’m not sure I agree. Is cool that there’s a sustainable team dedicated to keeping my dream alive, and when things go well (eg airlines and supply chain running smoothly) it’s nice to take some credit. But in tens of impact it’s the open source users etc that I think of first, they aren’t really correlated to the billion dollars part.
UncleMeat 3y ago
I don't agree with this at all. First, I don't think that society is best when optimizing for adding as many dollars of value to society as possible. This is easy to measure, but there are a great many other incredibly valuable things that don't involve large visible changes in the economy. Second, I don't think that unicorn startups are necessarily providing economic value to society. A company can become worth an absolute mountain of money while making society materially worse.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > This is easy to measure, but there are a great many other incredibly valuable things that don't involve large visible changes in the economy. Technically there is still an implicit money transfer in those cases, it's just the debt is settled immediately. Remember, money is an IOU – used when you promise to give something that you cannot deliver on right now. Business seeks to deliver value at a scale that would make it impractical for all the debts to be settled in the moment, thus money (promises owed to the business) does become a reasonable measure of how well it is scaling. Things that are incredibly valuable to society do benefit from being scaled up to provide that benefit to more and more people. > A company can become worth an absolute mountain of money while making society materially worse. No company becomes worth mountains of money without making society better in some way. Every act comes with negative externalities, of course.
  - UncleMeat 3y ago
    > No company becomes worth mountains of money without making society better in some way. A pharmaceutical company that concludes that they can increase the price of their drug by 10x and only lose 3/4 of the sales is going to be a more valuable company. It will have increased revenue and profit and that will be reflected in its stock price. This decision makes the world materially worse. It only looks like an improvement when we measure based on revenue and profit rather than the amount of health improvement that the business provides to the world.
    - randomdata 3y ago
thfuran 3y ago
>If there are people who could be adding a billion dollars in value to their society and choose not to It isn't generating value that makes a company valuable, it's capturing it. You can generate value for society without earning a cent.
dartos 3y ago
What makes a “real” unicorn? There was a time where FTX, Theranos, and WeWork were all unicorns and none of them had real “meat.” Uber is/was a unicorn and the gig economy has proven awful for society. (Underpay what amount to employees while giving them no benefits or recourse and at the same time destroying taxi companies that did) Facebook was also a unicorn… I think billion dollar companies that “do more” (eg. be a net good) for humanity are as rare as individuals who do, especially if they are profit driven.
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  Uber decreased US road fatalities by 4% and alcohol-related traffic deaths by 6%. https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/study-ride-sharing-apps-led-to-6-drop-in-alcohol-related-traffic-fatalities/ https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/study-ride-shari...
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    If they get credit for this, do they bear some partial responsibility if it goes up due to their significant price hikes over the past few years too?
    - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
      Even more interesting to think about: if so, then do governments like Germany, which have severely restricted Uber, bear any responsibility for the lives not saved from alcohol-related traffic fatalities?
MSFT_Edging 3y ago
>could be adding a billion dollars in value to their society Lets be real, I'm sure many of people here have jobs where they have to insist this is true, but that billion number is inflated nonsense. Most startups are not adding that much value to society. Maybe finding a way to middle-man extract that from society, yeah, but not adding it.

gizmo 3y ago

No look, the point is that people widely lampooned Peter Thiel for encouraging smart and ambitious students to drop out. So many people predicted this was guaranteed to fail. And the Thiel Fellowships have been a resounding success. I was one of those people who didn't think Thiel Fellows would accomplish much and I was wrong.

CogitoCogito 3y ago
Has it actually accomplished much for the fellows? A few posts up /u/prepend wrote this: > and does not match the success of Thiel’s programs for generating successful startups (11/900 is a pretty amazing success rate) That may be an amazing success rate for generating startups, but it would also mean that 98.8% of the startups weren't successful. Was dropping out actually good for the fellows aside from a few? Couldn't many argue that for most of these "smart and ambitious" students it really did fail? I'm not really taking a position here because I don't think failure alone means something wasn't worth it. Also I haven't followed Thiel's program that much so can't speak to the specifics. But given the numbers in this thread, I certainly wouldn't recommend students drop out.
- prepend 3y ago
  That’s 11 multibillion startups. Not that everyone else was a failure. Although even it meant 11 unicorns out of 900 and the rest were zero, those are amazing odds that many would gamble 1-2 years of their life on. Especially at 20. But the article talks about how the others were also successful, just not multi-billion dollar company successful.
  - CogitoCogito 3y ago
    I’d be curious of the median (as well as other quantiles) earnings (less university costs) say over 10 years for the individuals involved compared to peers that didn’t drop out. Obviously this isn’t the sort of information that’s easy to obtain. But without it I don’t share your rosy outlook on the program. It seems to me like this easily could be a net negative for most of the students engaging in it.

prepend 3y ago

I agree. But with all the diverse elite institutions, many of them are focusing on startups, there should be some with higher success rates.