I heard him make his "strive to be a monopoly" speech during one of the startup videos that Ycombinator puts on. veen introduced me to it. I'm pretty sure it was Theil. It's not that earth shattering, it makes sense and it's not a terribly new concept. People have been told to "differentiate" their businesses forever. Couple differentiation with mastery and efficiency and you've got a product that likely cannot be touched. Easier said than done, but not anything new.And remember, we live in a world in which courage is in far shorter supply than genius.
Do we? I think we use the term "genius" too liberally these days. If, what Theil means is that ideas are cheap and action is where it's at, then "yes" I would agree.
Funny that I find this here. I was discussing science and innovation with a good friend who has a startup in online education. He mentioned Thiel's view on competition. What I dislike about his view is his idea that innovation mainly comes from companies that can set their own rules (because universities/governments are too bureaucratic). I think that academia has to be restructured to support new ideas and not just fund things that will work out. Don't understand me wrong, some research that follows the normal timeline should be funded, because its important (thinking about antibiotic research here). But more has to be done towards absolutely new ideas. Additionally, putting such things into the hands of a company means that that particular idea needs to be profitable. And this is where many good ideas fail. They are not profitable, not in the next 5 or 10 years. Those are long term solutions that need to be worked on. Go find investors that will not get a cent back during their lifetime. I do agree that competition is stupid. In research its absolutely destructive, because it pushes people into a direction that -in their eyes- justifies fraud and scientific misconduct. Which are processes that keep science behind instead of pushing it forward.
"This is, I think, the big problem with competition: it focuses us on the people around us, and while we get better at the things we’re competing on, we lose sight of anything that’s important, or transcendent, or truly meaningful in our world." This statement resonates a lot with me. I remember doing art as a job and after a few years I had definitely improved in style and technique, but because I was making art for other people, I lost the ability to make art for myself. It was really frustrating to sit down and try to draw things only to find the ideas that came out were entirely somebody else's. It took me a few years to get part of it back after stopping, but it never really came completely back.