Peter Thiel
| Peter Thiel's talk, "Developing the Developed World," at this year's DLD Conference in Munich is full of ideas and insights on the future of technology innovation and business. Thiel believes that the reason PayPal, Facebook and other online companies are successful is that they maintain and combine the real and the virtual and that successful innovation in the future needs to follow these guidelines. |
Thiel believes that the reason PayPal, Facebook and other online companies are successful is that they maintain and combine the real and the virtual. PayPal allowed people to use actual dollars rather than try to replace money with a new fiat currency. Facebook is about sharing what is real about people, not artificial avatars and fictional aspects of people's personalities.
The talk "Developing the Developed World," embedded below is full of ideas and insights from both a futurist and business perspective. Also at the end, Thiel is asked about his issues with education and discusses why he created the controversial 20 Under 20 fellowship program, which awards $100,000 grants to young students so that they could leave their universities and focus on their work, research or ideas.
According to Thiel, this century will be about globalization and technology. He argued, these are two ways to consider innovation and growth models. Technology is about creating something new and rapid growth, while globalization is about copying things that already work. In the next century, says Thiel, “we have to do both.”
Four possibilities for the future are likely to happen to developed countries thinks Thiel: Growth and innovation can continue at a decelerating rate; they can enter a cyclical pattern of growth and collapse; completely collapse, or continue to accelerate. In the end, of course, the only acceptable and optimistic option in his view is accelerated growth.
The one area where we are doing well, however, is in computers, mostly thanks to Moore’s Law and the rapid progress in software. So if we want to continue to see accelerated growth in all of the areas where innovation has slowed, he argued, we will have to look to technology. The examples he cited for this that are already at the cusp of becoming reality are Google’s self-driving cars that could solve some transportation problems and the bioinformatics revolution that could drive healthcare forward in the coming years.
In Thiel's view, there are two different axis for 21st Century, technology and globalization (see top image). They are compatible, but they are very different Globalization is about taking something and scaling it to fit the world, generally to produce and distribute whatever it is more widely. Technology, however, is about going from nothing to something. It is an entirely new thing.
"The big idea I would like to leave with you today is that there is something very different about going from 1 to n versus going from 0 to 1. It requires different approaches and different ways of thinking about things," said Thiel.
Asked about the harmful effects of growth and acceleration, Thiel noted that he was talking about “good technological innovation,” including improved economic well being and sustainability. The only way forward, however, he believes is through technological progress because the alternative is to condemn millions of people to poverty.
SOURCE DLD Conference
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