Competition Is for Losers with Peter Thiel (How to Start a Startup 2014: 5)

Most of this lecture is merely a convoluted parallel construction of a fact which is already quite obvious, that if you want to make a profit you should avoid competition.

He claims that "the amount of value that you produce", and "the amount of that value that you can capture" are independent variables, but then spends the rest of his lecture treating them as strongly anti-correlated.

He touches briefly on the corrolary that capitalism does not actually reward people for the value they create, and seems to think of this as something of a problem, but I think that should be the focus of his lecture. If he really wants to convince the students of something that they didn't already believe, the talk should be titled "value is for losers".

here's the transcript, for those of you that read faster than peter thiel talks

https://genius.com/Peter-thiel-lecture-5-business-strategy-a...

I heard the talk as a sort of deprogramming of university graduates (or dropouts) from the cult of careerism. For years they've had it beaten into them that they have to "be competitive" in order to "succeed" -- when in the real world the outsized rewards go instead to those who succeed while hardly competing at all.

"We always think of advertising as this thing that works on other people, for all the stupid people who follow ads on TV, but they obviously work to some extent and they work to the disturbing extent on all of us and it's something we must work to overcome."

I've heard this alot. But, I happen to know it doesn't work well on me at all. I know this, because I can create a pie chart of all my spending and show you that a very tiny percent of it is products I've ever seen advertisements for (Most of my spending is on products that don't have advertisement - not that I'm against ads, it just worked out that way).

But, why does he say it's something we should work to overcome? If you are making smart purchasing decisions as a consumer or business, then there's no need to "overcome advertisement". On the contrary, it can point out products you might rather buy - although this rarely happens because advertisement still sucks.

If you are smart about your spending, then advertisement isn't the problem. The problem is all the bad products we're forced to buy because there's no alternatives and very limited competition: ISPs, Utilities (electricity, water, garbage), Housing.

The content of this talk was in his book, Zero to One, it's well written, a good read.

I like the fact that he's being honest: it's about making money. There's no pretense of "changing the world" BS.

This is a great talk. Made me really reconsider what I spend my time on for personal projects.

Could someone please clarify what the ": 5" in "2014: 5" means? Thanks.