Why Most VCs Misunderstand Peter Thiel’s Power Law

So, tell me about the last round interview you had with Peter Thiel right before you joined Founders Fund. Uh I don't know if they still do this, but at Founders Fund, you basically go and you meet everybody who works there. There's not that many people who work there at any given time, sort of a dozen people.

And then your last round interview is you go or it used to be you would go and you'd have breakfast with Peter. I remember walking into uh his place when he was still living in San Francisco. Obviously, he's not anymore.

And we had this two-hour amazing conversation. And you know, this is sort of after Oh. a decade of reading his stuff and you know, being deeply engrossed in the gospel of Peter.

So, this is like it's an incredible moment for a young a young Eric, 28 at the time. And we're talking about zero to one and founder psychology and different markets and being contrarian versus being consensus and the tradeoffs therein, etc. etc.

Very heady stuff. And I asked him some question, I don't remember what it was, but he sort of just one of his uh textbook pauses where he just stops and thinks for around 15 seconds. And he looks at me and he goes, "You know what, Eric?

We're just trying to make investments. It's really all we're trying to do here. And that was that was incredibly profound moment because I, like many other people in Silicon Valley, had been sort of operating under the the the premise that there's a magical way of selecting these unicorn companies.

And that way of thinking about the world, those frameworks, were unrelated from the fundamentals of the actual business. You read you read enough Paul Graham essays, you read zero to one, um you know, maybe you get into the archives of Max Levchin's blog.