Very detailed notes of Peter Thiel's startup class at Stanford
I came across a blog with very specific notes on the class Peter Thiel is currently teaching at Stanford. I've been going through a class lecture a day when I get some down time in the office. Here are some takeaways I thought we're good from the first 3 lessons. (Some of these are little obvious, but still hold true)
Lesson 1: Progress comes in two flavors: horizontal/extensive and vertical/intensive.
- Horizontal or extensive progress basically means copying things that work. In one word, it means simply “globalization.”
- Vertical or intensive progress, by contrast, means doing new things. The single word for this is “technology.” Intensive progress involves going from 0 to 1 (not simply the 1 to n of globalization)
Lesson 2 “To understand businesses and startups in 2012, you have to do the truly contrarian thing: you have to think for yourself. The question of what is valuable is a much better question than debating bubble or no bubble.
Lesson 3 Maybe making the world a smaller place is exactly what you want to do. Maybe you don’t want to work in big markets. Maybe it’s much better to find or make a small market, excel, and own it.
And yet, the single business idea that you hear most often is: the bigger the market, the better. That is utterly, totally wrong. The restaurant business is a huge market. It is also not a very good way to make money.
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*This is not my blog, and I don't go to Stanford.
