While your colleagues chase "safe" corporate careers, billionaire Peter Thiel just revealed why playing it safe is the riskiest strategy of all. The institutions everyone trusts to provide security are structurally designed to fail.
Look, it used to be simple. Obvious, even. Up until maybe the mid-2000s, business logic was dead straightforward: your team builds something real, something that sells, or you're out. No one paid you to vibe. The whole chain—from engineers to sales—had to be tight. Managers weren’t MBA influencers; they were former engineers who actually knew what the hell was going on. Budgets were tight, headcount was lean, and if you weren’t essential, you weren’t there.
Then around 2007, two things collided. First, the iPhone dropped—and suddenly, people lost their minds. They started believing in fairy tales. Thought if you dressed like Steve Jobs and waved your hands around dramatically onstage, the universe would just... deliver innovation. Like cargo cults with black turtlenecks.
At the same time, the market got flooded with absurd money. Private equity, VCs—firehosing cash at anything that looked vaguely “disruptive.” If you squinted and looked sorta like Jobs, congrats—you just got a funding round the size of Serbia’s GDP.
That’s when it all went sideways. Execution stopped mattering. Mimicking genius replaced being competent. Image devoured function.
And now, twenty years deep into that delusion, the cheap money’s gone. Interest rates are real again. And suddenly, folks are remembering: oh right, you actually have to *do* something. Not just pitch it. Welcome back to reality.
I found myself nodding through most of this, especially the critique of “performance theater” in corporate innovation. But I want to push back gently on one part. Thiel tends to underplay how much even small experiments often rely on institutional support. I have seen plenty of breakthroughs die not from lack of courage but from lack of patient backing. I think risk-taking matters, but so does building leadership willing to tolerate failure and learn from it. Thanks for the great reading!
That was a good read. I get that politics aside Thiel will have lots of interesting perspectives and this was definitely one of them. I think what is missing though, is the elephant in the room. Politics right now, thanks to Thiel and others, is likely to destroy us all. Iinnovation in government, in politics, and in society's ability to make sense of the fire hose of conflicting opinions, information, and data that it is exposed to, is essential and at the same time existentially lacking. So the fact that it is not mentioned is a huge blind spot.
Look, it used to be simple. Obvious, even. Up until maybe the mid-2000s, business logic was dead straightforward: your team builds something real, something that sells, or you're out. No one paid you to vibe. The whole chain—from engineers to sales—had to be tight. Managers weren’t MBA influencers; they were former engineers who actually knew what the hell was going on. Budgets were tight, headcount was lean, and if you weren’t essential, you weren’t there.
Then around 2007, two things collided. First, the iPhone dropped—and suddenly, people lost their minds. They started believing in fairy tales. Thought if you dressed like Steve Jobs and waved your hands around dramatically onstage, the universe would just... deliver innovation. Like cargo cults with black turtlenecks.
At the same time, the market got flooded with absurd money. Private equity, VCs—firehosing cash at anything that looked vaguely “disruptive.” If you squinted and looked sorta like Jobs, congrats—you just got a funding round the size of Serbia’s GDP.
That’s when it all went sideways. Execution stopped mattering. Mimicking genius replaced being competent. Image devoured function.
And now, twenty years deep into that delusion, the cheap money’s gone. Interest rates are real again. And suddenly, folks are remembering: oh right, you actually have to *do* something. Not just pitch it. Welcome back to reality.
I found myself nodding through most of this, especially the critique of “performance theater” in corporate innovation. But I want to push back gently on one part. Thiel tends to underplay how much even small experiments often rely on institutional support. I have seen plenty of breakthroughs die not from lack of courage but from lack of patient backing. I think risk-taking matters, but so does building leadership willing to tolerate failure and learn from it. Thanks for the great reading!
That was a good read. I get that politics aside Thiel will have lots of interesting perspectives and this was definitely one of them. I think what is missing though, is the elephant in the room. Politics right now, thanks to Thiel and others, is likely to destroy us all. Iinnovation in government, in politics, and in society's ability to make sense of the fire hose of conflicting opinions, information, and data that it is exposed to, is essential and at the same time existentially lacking. So the fact that it is not mentioned is a huge blind spot.