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petertiel

After graduating from Stanford Law School, Peter Thiel took a job at a top law firm in New York. From the outside, it seemed like a highly coveted job, one that many qualified lawyers were trying to snag. After taking the position, however, Thiel developed a different perspective.

“There was this really bizarre dynamic where from the outside, everybody was trying to get in, and from the inside everybody was trying to get out,” he said. “I left the law firm after seven months and two days. One of the people down the hall told me, ‘It’s really reassuring to see that it’s possible to escape from Alcatraz.’” For Thiel, escaping was just finding the courage to walk out the door.

Perhaps Thiel’s experience following the crowd in his early career decisions was a catalyst for the billionaire’s eccentric resume, which now includes cofounding PayPal and being the first outside investor in Facebook. Thiel also established the unconventional Thiel Fellowship, which encourages students to drop out of college to pursue their own ventures. Somehow, a man who was once funneled from a top-ranked law school to a conventional career in law is now a known advocate for students to break from the masses and find a unique niche.

This topic is largely discussed in Thiel’s new book, “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future,” which he promoted on his visit to campus on Monday when he spoke before a packed crowd at the latest installment of the Wharton Leadership Program’s Authors@Wharton series.

Thiel believes that those who don’t try to pave their own paths “are just being lazy” and “not thinking hard enough about what is going on.” Those who do truly work hard to find new answers to questions, he said, have the opportunity to create historical innovations that can never be recreated.

“I think that every moment in business, every moment in the history of technology only happens once,” he said. “The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page won’t build a search engine and the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t build a social network.”

Thiel said that to join the ranks of Gates, Page and Zuckerberg takes exploring the junction between “mysteries,” which are impossible to figure out, and “conventional truths,” or things that are well understood by everyone. Thiel labels this junction “secrets, [or] things that are hard but possible to figure out.”

“In the 18th century, if you looked at a map, you could say, ‘Well, I don’t really know what is at this part of the map,’ and you could become an explorer to find out,” Thiel said. “But that’s not the case anymore today as we have mapped out the entire surface of the planet; there are no secrets left to geography.” But most subjects, he added, are not like geography.

When he cofounded PayPal in 1999, Thiel was working to answer his own “secrets,” trying to determine the potential of digital currency and change the nature of money. He even hoped to replace the U.S. dollar. PayPal was creating its own unique domain and could not be easily described as part of a specific industry, a trait that Thiel believes is indicative of future success for startups.

He is irked by the startups that attempt to join established industries and use buzzwords that he claims to be allergic to: big data, cloud computing, health care IT, mobile Internet and education software, among others. For those whose companies can easily fit into an existing category, Thiel compares their chances of success to those of someone who, in the 21st century, wants to be an explorer and search for new areas on the globe.

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