It seems like a special case of the paradox of thrift: it's rational to save, but if everyone saves nobody can save because for one to save another must spend.

It seems like a special case of the paradox of thrift: it's rational to save, but if everyone saves nobody can save because for one to save another must spend. (Even if you don't like some of Keynes other ideas, this was one of his key insights. The other is the importance of the velocity of money in the wealth of societies. Superficially Saudi Arabia looks richer than the US because per capita it has more savings, but it's actually poorer because monetary velocity is lower. Wealth is a verb, not a noun.) In this case you want to be a monopoly, but you want all your suppliers and anyone else you purchase from to be subject to brutal competition. Or as an employee, you want your employer to be a monopoly (and your own skills to be scarce in the labor market) but you want the rest of the market to be brutally competitive. You can see this in the net neutrality debate. Those who run the Internet want to monopolize and differentiate. Those who use the Internet -- including most non-carrier Internet companies -- want them to be pure commodities subject to crushing competition. The ideal for you the user, or for Netflix or Google, would be to have free broadband Internet access everywhere. Paradoxes are the norm not the exception in complex systems fields like economics, ecology, and evolutionary dynamics. Most things involve some sort of paradoxical catch-22, trade-off, trichotomy, or N-chotomy. Thiel is just showing us this paradox from a different perspective than we're normally accustomed to thinking about it. It is the proper perspective for an entrepreneur-- you want to find something that can be leveraged to create a monopoly so you can accumulate capital and income enough to move on to the next things before your monopoly status is challenged.