This was the most interesting of this series of notes yet.
And the conclusion was the weakest.
Thiel seems like a pretty creepy character. When you have enough FU money, you can indulge a really skewed view of the world (former Intel exec comes to mind). And this series of lectures illustrates Theil's. He thinks someone, a young and naive (pre-university) prodigy, is going to make him a wealtier VC by sharing with him their "secret" idea. He criticizes education and America's lack of meaningful innovation, yet he's made wealthy by vacuous ideas of "innovation" like Facebook. Then look at what he's contributed in the way of innovation. What are his qualifications as an "expert"? An online payments company and a company that analyzes data from the web to try to find "terrorists". This is innovation? We should hope his program participants will aspire to do better.
In his last lecture on biotech where he talks about a panel of VC making predictions about the future. Were any of these VC actually in the biotech sector? As long as they have lots of capital under their direction, does it matter?
When you are wealthy people will listen to you, no matter what you say. Alas, it may encourage the speaker to believe their own hype even more. Thiel is taking full advantage of this privilege.
Gotta love these ~30 minute old accounts with 7 karma howling at the moon that the neither the first successful online payments company, nor the most successful social network in Internet history, nor a ~$100billion/year big data company are 'innovative'.
They may not be nuclear fusion or the perpetual motion machine, but they're more innovative than 99% of what everyone else will ever do.
Your point about wealth buying you a soapbox was interesting, but you went off the rails with that middle paragraph.
I think this hyper-"ironic" everything-bashing when it comes to innovation is a very low variety of discourse.
It's true that most of these social media startups are overvalued garbage that are going to prove themselves to be career graveyards (or sandtraps, at the least) when the tide goes out. And the people who join these unimaginative VC darlings for 0.02% of the pie (with preferences against that equity) are going to lose big time. That said, the reflexive "<X> isn't a real innovation" attitude when X is the solution to a real problem (e.g. self-driving cars, fraud detection, or even well-designed smart-phone interfaces) is a bit annoying. It may not be the flying car, but this X is usually something that came out of a lot of hard work on a problem that's just much more difficult than it seems it "should" be.
I think there's a resentment that builds in a lot of people due to a discrepancy between the real forces that produce technological improvements and the popular press. Reality: technological innovation is slow and incremental, with one seemingly insignificant change making another step possible, and that making another step feasible... until there is eventual macroscopic change, over time. It's gradual and, on the surface, doesn't appear that interesting. Popular depiction, for a contrast: visionary businessmen and "technologists" and "hackers" are driving the future. The backlash against that is that people single out these "visionaries" (many of whom are overrated) and denigrate everything they've accomplished as "not a real innovation". There's truth in the matter of these "visionaries" being overrated, but on the other hand, that doesn't mean that technological progress isn't happening. It's just gradual and unpredictable, and often fails to emerge where we want it. Technological progress actually pushes through on its own terms, rather than being pulled where wanted. For example, human transportation has been stagnant in price and quality (in the US) since 1960. That's a real morale problem on a national scale. But to single out Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as "not real innovators" because they haven't cured cancer or delivered $40 worldwide airfares is a big of a leap.
So, all you have to say about Peter Thiel is that his ideas are screwed up without reason why and that his credential/track record didn't match up what you think is innovative?
If you're going to criticize Thiel, show us reasons why his ideas are wrong.
If he wants to show his ideas are right, it is on him to prove it with evidence. Anyone with a loud microphone can talk endlessly. It is easy to cherry pick examples to support your idea.
(It's not what I think is innovative. Who cares what I think? I'm just some commenter on Hacker News with a green account. Thiel himself criticized the iPhone and by extension similar Silicon Valley products as not being the type of "innovation" he thinks America is capable of. I'm suggesting he's hardly in a position to make that criticism given that he himself benefits from this meaningless stuff SV churns out.)
his last lecture on biotech where he talks about a panel of VC making predictions about the future. Were any of these VC actually in the biotech sector?
Just looked at it and it would seem that they were, presuming that you mean Brian Slingerland of Stem CentRx, Balaji Srinivasan of Counsyl, and Brian Frezza of Emerald Therapeutics from the lecture;
No, I meant a panel of VC's that occured some time prior to the date of the lecture, not the panel at the lecture. The speakers at the lecture were not VC. But I can't find the reference to it now. So I guess ignore that comment.
And the conclusion was the weakest.
Thiel seems like a pretty creepy character. When you have enough FU money, you can indulge a really skewed view of the world (former Intel exec comes to mind). And this series of lectures illustrates Theil's. He thinks someone, a young and naive (pre-university) prodigy, is going to make him a wealtier VC by sharing with him their "secret" idea. He criticizes education and America's lack of meaningful innovation, yet he's made wealthy by vacuous ideas of "innovation" like Facebook. Then look at what he's contributed in the way of innovation. What are his qualifications as an "expert"? An online payments company and a company that analyzes data from the web to try to find "terrorists". This is innovation? We should hope his program participants will aspire to do better.
In his last lecture on biotech where he talks about a panel of VC making predictions about the future. Were any of these VC actually in the biotech sector? As long as they have lots of capital under their direction, does it matter?
When you are wealthy people will listen to you, no matter what you say. Alas, it may encourage the speaker to believe their own hype even more. Thiel is taking full advantage of this privilege.