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.

1. Horizontal or extensive progress basically means copying things that work. In one word, it means simply “globalization.”
2. 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.