Peter Thiel came to talk today at Stanford University about entrepreneurship and how his company that he started, PayPal, became more and more popular. I helped set up the event with BASES volunteers and we got the ball rolling!
BASESPeeps!
He first started with talking of California and Silicon Valley, how its become such a place of entrepreneurship and affluence. He jokes that "why would somebody move to Oklahoma from California". He then moves to which businesses have been successful, those being mainly in the internet business. He makes sure to point out that companies need to look ahead and think of the future. From here, he moves into talks of past man's hopes, those of living on the moon, Mars or even Jupiter. After this is when he really moves into his main focus of his discussion: entrepreneurship slowing down in the past 25 years.
Peter Thiel andI :D
According to Thiel, in the seventies and eighties, progress was quick. "There were far more drug innovations in the seventies and eighties then in the last twenty years..." Thiel's main worry is that people are not really moving forward, innovation is slow at the moment.
Setting up for the event!
He moves into the example of China, and of it being great and doing tremendous amounts of work, but it being bad at innovation. It will catch up to the US according to him because it uses the innovations of China.
He reemphasizes "intrinsic growth" and his example that for something to go from zero to one, it takes a lot more effort then from going to one to n. What he means that for some sort of innovation to start, it usually fails or is really difficult to start from zero to one. Such is the example with Facebook. It started from the (1-n) field when other social networking businesses that came before Facebook *cough cough Myspace* started in the (0-1) field when the jump was much bigger and there was a lot more to use.
Peter Thiel
He later took questions from people... These are some of my favorite. (and not word by word)
If you're going to take a risk, go big on your company.
Be passionate in your company, and take pride in it.
Don't be afraid for risk, and actually do sacrifice.
On November 17, at 7 PM at the local Faculty Club at Stanford University, there was a Mentorship Reception dinner for BASES members and Founders and VCs from the area.
People that attended were...
Seth Sternburg who is the founder of Meebo. Meebo is a web startup that allows you to connect to all of your IM'ing services in one site, allowing to talk to all of your friends, family, and acquaintances in one place. He talked of how to better get your company name out by telling people what your ideas are and then create them and get people hyped out about them.
Andrew Smolik who is the founder of Courserank. Courserank is a startup up that allows college students to be able to get feedback in one place about courses, blog about favorite professors, and see what the average grade and workload is for a particular class. It also allows students to be able to better manage timing with classes and get a better way to view daily schedules. Andrew and I talked of how a schedule startup works and how to better get one off the ground.
Paul Bragiel who is the Managing Partner at I/O Ventures, a program that allows for a four month growth session for people to grow their startups outward. He provided excellent advice on how to better grow yourself and become a better entrepreneur and be more successful.
Howard Hatenbaum who is an Angel at August Capitol. He was the leading founder in Skype and has provided funding to various other startups. He was a really amazing individual to talk to who provided key advice on how to be a stronger person in the entrepreneur world and that when you have an idea, start on it, because a bunch of other people in the world have thought of the same idea at the same time.
There were also a lot of other mentors that came to speak which were, but not limited to, the amazing Larry Chiang who helped me better introduce myself to people and how to make myself a more viable person in looking for an internship with a web based startup. I thought the dinner went wonderful and helped me get my own idea of the ground as I got valuable input on how to better make my idea more appealing. It was a robust environment teaming with some of the greatest minds from Silicon Valley. Many conversations happened and many more ideas blossomed in this deep environment.
