Class 3 Notes Essay Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 3 Notes Essay Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 3 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are my own. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely. CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—Value Systems The history of the ‘90s was in many ways the history of widespread confusion about the question of value. As we discussed back in Class 1, certain questions and frameworks can anchor our thinking about value. A somewhat different perspective on technology—going from 0 to 1, to revisit our earlier terminology—is the financial or economic one. I. Great companies do three things. The first point is straightforward. Great companies last. Finally—and relatedly—you have to capture much of the value you create in order to be great. II. One way that people try and objectively determine a company’s value is through multiples and comparables. pre-money valuation = ($1M*n_engineers) - ($500k*n_MBAs). One does valuation analysis at a given point in time. III.
This column will change your life: underachieving For obvious reasons, it's entirely appropriate that a book entitled The Underachiever's Manifesto never really became a huge seller. Written by an American doctor named Ray Bennett – not the kind of doctor whom I'd necessarily want if I had a life-threatening illness – it vanished soon after its debut, in 2006. Now, though, its publishers have finally got it together to release it as an ebook in Britain, so you can download it. I mean, if you like. Subtitled The Guide To Accomplishing Little And Feeling Great, Bennett's short treatise seems at first like another of those jokey-but-unfunny gift books they sold by the tills at Borders, back before Borders itself stopped achieving. Partly, that's just because moderation's often best. This column has previously extolled the virtues of "deliberate mediocrity" as a strategy for beating perfectionism.
Class 2 Notes Essay Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 2 Notes Essay Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 2 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are my own. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely. CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—Party Like It’s 1999? I. History is driven by each generation’s experience. Take someone born in the late 1960s, for instance. There is a keen analogue between the cultural intensity of the ‘60s and the technological intensity of the 1990s. History is a strange thing in that it often turns out to be quite different than what people who lived through it thought it was. II. Most of the 1990s was not the dot com bubble. The 1990s could be said to have started in November of ’89. So from 1992 through the end of 1994, it still felt like the U.S. was mired in recession. To be sure, technological development was going on in Silicon Valley. The Internet would change all that. So Netscape comes along in ’93 and things start to take off. III. A. B. So that’s what they did.
Things to worry about When he wasn’t busy writing some of the most critically lauded and enduring novels of the 20th Century, The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald could often be found penning the most fascinating of letters to such famous characters as his good friend, Ernest Hemingway; editor extraordinaire, Maxwell Perkins; and his wife and fellow author, Zelda—to name but a few. However, no letters are more revealing, or indeed endearing, than those written to his daughter, Scottie, many of which see him imparting wisdom in a way only he could. This particular letter of advice, written to Scottie while she was away at camp and still just 11 years of age, is a perfect example. (Source: F. La Paix, Rodgers' Forge Towson, MarylandAugust 8, 1933Dear Pie:I feel very strongly about you doing duty.
Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (born October 11, 1967) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager. Thiel cofounded PayPal with Max Levchin and Elon Musk and served as its CEO. He also co-founded Palantir, of which he is chairman. He serves as president of Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund with $700 million in assets under management; a managing partner in Founders Fund, a venture capital fund with $2 billion in assets under management; co-founder and investment committee chair of Mithril Capital Management; and co-founder and chairman of Valar Ventures.[4][5][6] He was the first outside investor in Facebook, the popular social-networking site, with a 10.2% stake acquired in 2004 for $500,000, and sits on the company's board of directors. Thiel was ranked #293 on the Forbes 400 in 2011, with a net worth of $1.5 billion as of March 2012.[2] He was ranked #4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014 at $2.2 billion.[7] Thiel lives in San Francisco, California.[8]
Charles Munger: A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business I’m going to play a minor trick on you today because the subject of my talk is the art of stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom. That enables me to start talking about worldly wisdom—a much broader topic that interests me because I think all too little of it is delivered by modern educational systems, at least in an effective way. And therefore, the talk is sort of along the lines that some behaviorist psychologists call Grandma’s rule after the wisdom of Grandma when she said that you have to eat the carrots before you get the dessert. The carrot part of this talk is about the general subject of worldly wisdom which is a pretty good way to start. After all, the theory of modern education is that you need a general education before you specialize. So, emphasizing what I sometimes waggishly call remedial worldly wisdom, I’m going to start by waltzing you through a few basic notions. What is elementary, worldly wisdom? You’ve got to have models in your head.
Peter Thiel's CS183: Startup - Class 1 Notes Essay Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 1 Notes Essay Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 1 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are my own. CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—The Challenge of the Future Purpose and Preamble We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness. Humanities majors may well learn a great deal about the world. I. For most of recent human history—from the invention of the steam engine in the late 17th century through about the late 1960’s or so— technological progress has been tremendous, perhaps even relentless. The importance of this shift is hard to overstate. The zenith of optimism about the future of technology might have been the 1960’s. But with the exception of the computer industry, it wasn’t. II. Computers have been the happy exception to recent tech deceleration. III. A. Progress comes in two flavors: horizontal/extensive and vertical/intensive. Vertical or intensive progress, by contrast, means doing new things. B.
Why willpower matters – and how to get it In the smart restaurant of a very smart hotel in the West End of London, Roy F Baumeister, eminent American social psychology professor, orders a lunch of fish and chips, and then decides not to eat the chips. "I won't eat something that's not good for me unless it's absolutely perfect, and it's going to give me real pleasure," he says. "I'm afraid ... Well, it just didn't look like these were going to do either." What willpower, you might say. You'd be right; the chips looked pretty good. Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength distills three decades of academic research (Baumeister's contribution) into self-control and willpower, which the Florida State University social psychologist bluntly identifies as "the key to success and a happy life". The result is also (Tierney's contribution) readable, accessible and practical. Willpower is, Baumeister argues over lunch, "what separates us from the animals. But without willpower, it seems, we're actually rarely OK.
Class 5 Notes Essay Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 5 Notes Essay Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 5 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are mine. Stephen Cohen, co-founder and Executive VP of Palantir Technologies, and Max Levchin of PayPal and Slide fame joined this class as guest speakers. Credit for good stuff goes to them and Peter. CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—The Mechanics of Mafia I. Everybody knows that company culture is important. Then there are some things that don’t work so well. And then there is what might be called anti-culture, where you really don’t even have a culture at all. Picture a 1-dimensional axis from consultant-nihilism to cultish dogmatism. Good company culture is more nuanced than simple homogeneity or heterogeneity. Similarly, differences qua differences don’t matter much. II. A. Generally speaking, capitalism and competition are better seen as antonyms than as synonyms. Sometimes, though, you need to compete. Gandhi is a great historical figure. B.
Fallacy List 1. FAULTY CAUSE: (post hoc ergo propter hoc) mistakes correlation or association for causation, by assuming that because one thing follows another it was caused by the other. example: A black cat crossed Babbs' path yesterday and, sure enough, she was involved in an automobile accident later that same afternoon. example: The introduction of sex education courses at the high school level has resulted in increased promiscuity among teens. 2. example: Muffin must be rich or have rich parents, because she belongs to ZXQ, and ZXQ is the richest sorority on campus. example: I'd like to hire you, but you're an ex-felon and statistics show that 80% of ex-felons recidivate. 3. example: All of those movie stars are really rude. 4. example: What's the big deal about the early pioneers killing a few Indians in order to settle the West? 5. 6. example: Either you favor a strong national defense, or you favor allowing other nations to dictate our foreign policy. example: It’s not TV. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.