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the yc app has a form of this as one of it's questions: "what do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?" one of thiel's
by clairity 12y ago
the yc app has a form of this as one of it's questions: "what do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?"
one of thiel's general business examples is "capitalism and competition are opposites". although his point is sound (business schools explicitly teach you to look for ways to avoid/eliminate competition), his definition of capitalism is a bit distorted to make this phrase work. capitalism is a decentralized economic system for deploying capital efficiently based on supply and demand, not simply for accumulating/concentrating capital (which is how thiel sees it).
- jlangenauer 12y ago"Efficiently", in this case, means deploying capital where it will accumulate the most profit. Not where it does the most good, or solves the most pressing or important problems.
- clairity 12y agoat a game theoretic level of you vs. the competition, that's true. you're trying to maximize profit because profit is used as a proxy for solving the most pressing problems (or desires) of a set of people (i don't believe profit is a perfect proxy, but that's another discussion). but if you want a stable and efficient economic (and political) system, you want capital to continuously flow through the system, not accumulate.