Peter Thiel: People overestimate the harvest of entrepreneurial failures

In San Francisco, July 24, DCM hosted the 2015 DCM CEO Summit in San Francisco, where more than 100 DCM CEOs from China, the US and Japan participated in the meeting. At the annual meeting, DCM also invited the most famous angel investor Peter Thiel of Silicon Valley to share with the onsite entrepreneur, according to Peter Thiel and DCM managing partner Jason Kirkorion in DCM The discussions at the CEO annual meeting were organized: PayPal listed: Was acquired also to innovate every time you sell a company, are bitter with sweet feeling, meaning the company has achieved a new level of success.　　In 2002, PayPal was sold to ebay, where 3/4 of our business is on ebay, but we are still thinking about how to make the product better. It is said that the payment in the next 5/6 years of innovation is limited, but 2008-2009 years later, there are new innovations in the payment field, so these things are not sure, PayPal even under the innovation of ebay, now 3/4 of the business is not on PayPal. The limitations of entrepreneurship: People overestimate the harvest of entrepreneurial failure in 2002 to 2005, entrepreneurship is a good time, Silicon Valley entrepreneurship is not many people, this time is very good.　　There was also a deep friendship between the several founders of PayPal, a lot of entrepreneurial people gathered, and later, people from PayPal made Yelp, YouTube, and LinkedIn.　　But there is still a point, most startups are either very successful, but the internal staff can not learn to business, in Microsoft, Google, where employees are just work, not to start a business, but also in the welfare of super-good big companies to eat free sushi, do free massage, these will constitute the limits of your business. On the contrary, when you failed to start a business, I raised the Silicon Valley was over-evaluated, from the failure to learn a lot of things, is the team is wrong, the product is wrong, the management method is wrong, the timing is wrong, or the business model is wrong?　　Am I just doing the wrong thing, and the rest is right? Sometimes the second time you start a business is not so ambitious, if you are very successful, may be over-successful, you will feel that you do not need to work harder. PayPal is somewhere in between, it's a success, but the process is difficult.　　This is actually very good, you took a lot of effort to achieve success. Entrepreneurial failure in the heart is always very uncomfortable, we have been successful and failed several times, you may not really be able to learn from the failure of things. But the only thing you have to do is go ahead, don't indulge in failure, be trapped in the past, we will fail but must find a way to not let it hit you. Idealized corporate management PayPal has a policy early on: never dismiss anyone. We have a utopian assumption that all employees do not need to be fired, we have a lot of veteran staff, and a technician didn't do well on the first day., the software did not make a backup, let us suffer a great loss, whether so let this person leave? I don't think it's necessary.　　Whether PayPal is a failure or a success, we want the relationship to continue, which is called Utopian thinking. From a management point of view, PayPal has a different mindset every 3 months, but we look at the status quo every quarter or every two quarters: now is the work of every employee meaningful?　　Do you want to make adjustments? The internal situation is also changing, if you do not adjust in a timely manner and laissez-faire, a lot of work will conflict, these situations do not completely occur when you want to fight with external competitors in the war. The most important is internal adjustment, which are internal challenges, sometimes if you are a very crazy boss, asking anyone to execute at any cost, such as the designation of two people responsible for the site, these two people will not be convinced that they will not cooperate well. So you need to constantly fine-tune the internal work, otherwise you will do a lot of useless. In order to diversify the similar style of thinking, we want to recruit people with diverse backgrounds to balance the company.　　In order to diversify, everyone should have clear responsibilities and definitions, and such ecosystems are healthy. From the outside, everyone must be sincere and consistent, we do not want everyone to be the same, they can wear the same work outfit, the mission is consistent, but I hope that both their skills and business are differentiated. Driven by the same goal, each individual has a significant advantage in having a differentiated ecosystem.　　Talk about the side effects of competition I think this is the point I have been insisting on, if you start a business, investors will certainly want you to be a phenomenon-level company, we have different ways to help you achieve different technologies, different ways to find distribution channels, and so on. But monopolies have been downplayed. Google's monopoly on its own is an understatement, Google's CEO said that he has more patents than Microsoft, when it is positioning itself as a search engine company, but Google does not want to let people think that they are monopoly, it will say that they have a lot of competitors such as Apple, Facebook and so on, to shape their own image,　　Blurring the boundaries between monopolies and competitors. The failure of competition is the failure of combat effectiveness and psychological failure.　　Do not thousand armies omnipotent horse over the plank bridge, this has the herd effect, but you do not want to be a member of the herd effect, if you can detect this, you can be better than others. Sometimes we put too much energy in the fight, too little to focus on the goal. We can find a lot of monopoly giants in the manufacturing industry in the 80 's, as well as new monopolies and ephemeral monopoly giants, and what they do may be beneficial to society, but the founders have nothing to gain. Therefore, do not establish a flash monopoly giants, to consider whether to bring sustained profits. Valuation do not look at the past, to see another idea is the next 10 years your business will be how to go? PayPal, the company that was founded in 2001, is largely profit fromAfter 2011, if you go to see its general data such as discount rate, growth rate, super growth rate, you will see all the value from 2011 onwards, we can almost see that each company's valuation is based on the profit after 2025 calculated, this is very crazy, 10 20 after the company will exist? But I think you have to take into account your forecasts for future cash flows in every round of valuations, and we always value our previous performance, but I think we should always think about future valuations based on the future. Small market cut into the two stages of monopoly, one is to seize the market time, and the other is to copy your time, the first stage if the time spent too long, others will come to copy you. Facebook starts out on campus and the market is small, but you can quickly capture the market. It's too late to copy when someone sees you, Twitter is like that.

Peter Thiel: People overestimate the rewards of entrepreneurial failure