Brain Bar

@jawwwn_ @peterthiel This is from his Brain Bar talk - he makes this case very explicitly on stage. 👉 youtu.be/FDkhfm6CYjE

Peter Thiel: Europe will never have massive tech companies because they fear success. "In Silicon Valley, there's this pornography of failure. You talk about all your failures, and this somehow means you're going to succeed." "In the social democratic European societies, it's acceptable to be moderately successful, it's not acceptable to be wildly successful. If you have a successful company that's starting to grow, it will get short-circuited, and you'll sell the company. You'll never get to an enormous company if you sell it along the way." "The single most important decision in the history of Facebook— summer of 2006. It was two years into the company. We got an acquisition offer for $1B from Yahoo to buy the company. There were three of us on the board— Mark Zuckerberg, myself, and another VC. We had a meeting to decide if we should take the $1B." "The two of us thought it was a lot of money, we should maybe take it. Mark started the board meeting— 'this is a pro forma thing, we're just going to talk about this for 10 minutes. Obviously we're not taking it.'" "Any super big tech company is one where you've been offered multiple times for people to buy it, and you've chosen never to sell it. You're not that afraid of success." "In Europe, the answer is to check out sooner rather than later and go back to the decade-long vacation that people are on in Europe."

@RyanSumo @politicsanimal @thezhanly @frnsys @sk_kira @davidoreilly Having you on stage certainly was a highlight for us as well Ryan!

Second highlight was 2018. @brainbarcom invited me to speak about @politicsanimal. Free trip to Budapest, plus met extraordinary people like Ted Chiang, @thezhanly @frnsys @sk_kira @davidoreilly. Dinner with smart, funny people is my favorite thing in the world #DecadeinReview