Dr Subbu on - Unconventional Entrepreneur: Peter Thiel, Co-Founder, PayPal

Peter Thiel is the co-founder of PayPal, the famous payment getaway on which Paytm is modelled. He is a venture capitalist, the first outside investor in Facebook, and has a net worth of $10 billion. He is an acclaimed author of the book Zero to One, an important book on entrepreneurship and innovation with his practical and unique wisdom. 

Thiel writes in the book "Each moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to N adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange." 

Peter Thiel has created what is also known as the Thiel Fellowship (https://lnkd.in/g7M_yNyQ) for young people. He gives a million dollars to a young bright fellow who has innovative business ideas. The condition is that he or she skips or drops out of college and builds that business. Thiel has a contrarian view of education. Thiel Fellowship says that a college education is good for learning what has been done before but it can also discourage you from doing something very new. 

Ritesh Aggarwal, the founder of OYO Rooms, is a Thiel fellow who got this grant to build the idea of OYO rooms in India. Ritesh Aggarwal also dropped out of college to build this unicorn which has gone from in Thiel parlance "zero to one".

Peter Thiel is an interesting entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is a conservative and a supporter of Donald Trump. Listening and reading to Thiel's idea of entrepreneurship and innovation is about listening to deeply felt truth that is also quite contrarian in nature.

Share your thoughts in the comments!

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Dr. M. Subramanian
Director – MBA Program
PhD (Finance),FDPM (IIM-A), MBA, MFC
Fin-Tech, Blockchain & Analytics

Visit : www.rlims.ac.in