Peter Thiel

Asked for a belief most people do not share, a cousin of Peter Thiel's interview question, Garry Tan rejects the idea that too much capital is chasing too few ideas and too few good people. He says the supply of real problems is basically unlimited, and that there are far more driven people than that line allows. He grants that the number is not literally infinite, because there are only so many people. He does believe that the right community and the right values let people change their own lives and the lives next to them. The responsibility, he says, sits with whoever builds those systems.

Garry shares a story about how he turned down the opportunity to start a company with his friends and Peter Thiel to stay at Microsoft and how that mistake cost him $200M.

Peter Thiel and Sean Parker teamed up to make sure Sequoia was not part of Facebook's early round. However, future sales of Instagram and WhatsApp to Facebook had given Sequoia a sufficient steak in the company.

Dave McClure told The Twenty Minute VC he will not quite claim a seat in the PayPal Mafia, because he has not built a billion-dollar company. He did work at PayPal. David Sacks was his boss and later sold Yammer to Microsoft for about a billion dollars. McClure worked with Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim before they started YouTube, and watched Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Reid Hoffman. The lesson was pressure: ship product and marketing while fraudsters stole money and eBay and Visa competed with you. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google found a model early. PayPal, like Amazon and Facebook, grew fast on a harder road, and its people learned to change the product in order to survive.

After leaving PayPal around 2004, Dave started investing recreationally. After he'd invested in about 13 companies over the next four year, some of them turned into 100M+ exists.

Dave ended up working for Founder's Fund with Peter Thiel and Sean Parker for about 1.5 years, and eventually got together with Christine Tsai to raise their own fund, 500 Startups.

If you want the diversity of thought and experience, don't go to university. To learn what other people are not learning, you have to put yourself in a place where you are not surrounded by people with the same groupthink. Leave the bubble and explore.

According to the discussion between Stewart Alsop III and Vinay Gupta , it is quite easy for people in San Francisco to put homeless people into the "us vs. them" groups and pretend the problem does not exist. At the end of the day though, poor people with health problems are prosecuted by the society, and it is important for the wealthy to realize that, to get out of the bubble, and to assist people who cannot help themselves, given the circumstances.

While the economy is doing well, people in technology circles fall under a false impression that technology is the answer to all of humanity's problems and they, tech founders and employees, are the winners. This notion is then further reinforced by the groups outside of the Valley who are cheering for tech and associated growth, making people in the bubble feel right. This newly acquired empowerment and wealth then turn tech people's focus on attaining more wealth, instead of solving problem they'd originally set out to solve, and as a result, cause their long-term success to dwindle.

According to Stewart Alsop, we humans always tend to put other people in boxes, turning a society into "Us vs. Them" situation.

It could be very helpful for the people in Silicon Valley to get out for a while and to see the world for what it is, which is a place drastically different from the bubble within the valley.

This transformative experience could help open one's eyes and to change how we treat and respond to people who are not like ourselves.

According to Peter Thiel, 1920s and 1930s was driven largely by a boom in technological and scientific progress. Even though the growth was badly mismanaged, the drivers for growth were solid. Meanwhile in today's world, we do a decent job at managing the economy, but technological growth is actually stagnating, while the big tech companies are still marketing themselves like the driver for the future.

In their discussion on the Portal, Peter and Eric discuss how the progress of innovation is stalling. We are no longer seeing the astounding growth that drove America in say the 1920s, and instead we only have innovation in bits.

Stewart Alsop III is an American entrepreneur and the host of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast .

He joins us on Smash Notes this week to talk about life in Silicon Valley through the lens of his own podcast, as well as the conversation between Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein on the Portal.

Back in the dot-com bubble days Peter Thiel though that physiologically he would not see another bubble for a lifetime because people wouldn't be able to repeat the rodeo, having gone through the trauma. Yet, we have gone through a number of bubbles in just the last two decades.

In 1990s the narrative was all about the new economy, and people lied about growth. In 2000s it was all about the great moderation, with a lie about volatility. Then in 2010 it was all about secular stagnation, and the lie was that interest rates were going to stay low forever.

Today we are just living in another bubble, having not fully realized what it is that we are lying to ourselves about.

Despite the depression, 1930s saw a boom in innovation and growth, riding on the tailwind of scientific and and technological innovation from the 1920s. Aviation, plastics, movies, appliances, and a bunch of other industries got going in that time. By 1939 three-times as many people had cars in US as they did in 1929. It all got badly mismanaged, but the basis for a booming economy were all there. Today, on the other hand, we are doing a fine job managing the economy, but we don't have such a strong tailwind to propel our growth.