Lessons from Peter Thiel | Focus

so I want to start with Lessons Learned you one of them that we were talking about this morning when we were doing our workout was um making decisions on Blended reasons or having like a blended strategy for how you're we're going to win we're going to win doing these five things and why that sounds like a good idea to the average person but it's actually a very bad idea can you explain that yeah I wrote this piece online like nine lessons from Peter chill I sent to All of palent here that's been like sent to

All to my other companies as well and it's one my favorite pieces and that's one of them and the it's one of these logic things where usually there's like one reason that dominates everything else and that's just that's just the nature of the world is that is that when something's successful it's it's kind of like the power law rule right like an Venture Capital like fund even there tends to be one thing that sucessful that's like bigger than everything else and that's true inside of companies as well it's it's very unusual like extraordinarily unusual for

there to be like two similarly equal like like like products or Revenue lines or something like that um especially early on in a company so usually if you if you think you have like two or three reasons for doing something or five reasons for doing something what that means is that you actually have figured out have re actual reason you have no strong reason yet like that means you have five weak reasons which is not good you want to find like what's like one really strong thing you're driving towards and that that's how startups work

and this is it's a really seductive trick trick I mean first of all you have to be taking a big risk to even do a startup it feels like rather than like you know most people lot of people like do incubators because they're like oh I don't want to do one company I'm GNA do 10 companies and like by the way that's like much less likely to have a big success because you're not focused and then so but so even within a company they're like they're trying to do the same thing they're trying to be

like well here's five ways I'm going to make money and like no no no man if you really want to do a company figure out the way you're going to make money and that that tends to be how it works you know and that applies to revenue streams so eight revenue streams means you probably don't have one awesome Revenue stream exactly growth strategies if you have seven things we're going to do for growth means you haven't figured out which one's actually the one that's going to work the one that's going to just compound like crazy

and it may change it may change over time but what's the thing that's working now you're pushing on yeah and then uh the other version of that is Blended reasons for doing something I think um I read once that Reed Hoffman kind of uses the same philosophy and he said he gave the example of oh if there's like a trip to China and I'm deciding should I go to China it's far away it's going to take two weeks and should I do this trip he's like and my chief of staff came with like a list

of pros and cons yes like multiple Pros multiple pros and then a couple of cons that's an almost impossible it's a guaranteed way to make mediocre decisions is to do long Blended list of if you don't have a key reason to be there like stick to your work yeah exactly that's what he said he's like if if we don't have one reason that that alone is worth doing then we should just say no is that something you do Reed was one of the key key Minds at PayPal of course with Peter T and others so

who knows who actually come up with these ideas it may all be Reed's ideas that I'm recycling he's a very smart guy well I sa them as for mine now so I think