Peter Thiel interview - How to Build the Future

Thank you very much. One of the tremendous challenges in teaching entrepreneurship or in writing a book about it is that there's sort of several different ways people typically do this that I think are actually not all that helpful. One is that you sort of give a lecture or talk about your own experiences. And so I talked to you about what we did at PayPal in 1999, 2000, how we linked email and money together. And these are sort of these idiosyncratic war stories that might be interesting but don't really uh... help you do anything particularly new in twenty fourteen and i think the other the other end of the spectrum is one where uh... where you basically treat uh... businesses sort of pseudo science and you come up with a formula and it's like these are the five steps you need to follow and if you follow these five steps you will uh... build a successful company and other the problem with these kinds of approaches is that uh... every uh...

Every moment in business, every moment in the history of business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page will not build a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg will not build a social networking site. If you're trying to copy these people, you're not learning from them. And so there are these sort of fundamentally paradoxical things about entrepreneurship because the critical thing is always to try to do something new. And that's probably the Zero to One companies that I describe in my book are these companies that break through and do something new that has not been done before and that is very valuable for the world and for the people who start these companies.

So the touchpoint of Zero to One is this question of the uniqueness of these businesses. So that's the thing that one has as a theme running through it. And I try to get at it through these various contrarian questions. One of them is, 'What great company is nobody building?' A second one is—a more intellectual version of it is—'Tell me something that's true that very few people agree with you on,' which is sort of an interview question I like asking. And it turns out to be a shockingly hard question for people to answer for, I think, two somewhat different reasons. One is because we've been taught that truth is conventional. Truth is things that a lot of people agree on. And so it sounds already incredibly hard to come up with a truth that no one is aware of or no one suspects exists.

But secondly, even more important, it's always a very awkward sort of question to answer, even if you have some ideas. If you're asking, you know, if I'm in an interview and I'm asking this question, the correct answer is one that the person asking the question will disagree with. If the person who's conducting the interview says, 'Yes, I already thought of that,' that's a bad answer. And we live in a world in which courage is in far shorter supply than genius. And so there are sort of all these reasons these things are sort of often very underexplored. So my book gives a whole series of these answers that I've come up with over time, things that I believe to be true about business that that most people disagree with me on.

And sort of my opening comments that I thought I would just maybe give three or so major of these themes from my book. The first theme is this idea that, you know, and I sort of frame it as every, and this is probably the overall, maybe the single overarching theme is that we think of capitalism and competition as synonyms, and I believe they are antonyms. I believe that a capitalist is someone who's in the business of accumulating capital. A world of perfect competition is a world where all the profits are competed away. So if you want to compete in a crazy way, you should open a restaurant. You will never make any money doing so. And at the other end of the spectrum, what I think everybody who is a founder or entrepreneur should aim to do is build a monopoly.

And all the great companies that people have built are monopolies of one sort or another. And I sort of use Google as the extreme example on the other end where it's an extremely capitalistic company. It makes enormous amounts of profits. And it's so capitalistic because it's had no competition since 2002 when it definitively distanced itself from Microsoft and Yahoo in the core search business. The opening line of Anna Karenina is that all happy families are alike, and all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way. And I think the opposite is true of business. I think in business, all happy companies are different because they figured out something unique to do. And all unhappy companies are alike because they failed to escape the essential sameness that is competition.

The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt of my book. The chapter was entitled, 'All Happy Companies Are Different.' They sort of took the chapter and they retitled it, 'Competition Is for Losers,' which got a little bit more attention from people. But it really gets at the core of this, because we normally think that losers are people who don't compete intensely enough. The people who are the losers are the ones who fail to compete really hard. You have sort of an educational testing model, a grading model, you know, sort of an athletics framework or something like that. A loser is someone who's not very competitive. And so if you say competition is for losers, that sort of really gets at the core of this difference.

This monopoly versus competition idea, there's sort of an intellectual reason people don't understand it. And it's very poorly understood, I think, even in Silicon Valley. Because the people who have monopolies pretend not to have them, and the people who don't have monopolies pretend to have them. And so it gets kind of confusing. And the way you do this rhetorically is, if you have a monopoly and you don't want the government to look into it too much, you will say that you are in a much, much bigger business. So if you're Google, you will never say that you're a search engine. You will say you're a technology company. And technology is a vast, incredibly competitive space. You're competing with Apple on iPhones, and you're competing with Microsoft on Word documents, and you're competing with Facebook on social, and with the Detroit car companies with your self-driving car.

And there's just competition everywhere. And on the other hand, if you're in a completely competitive business—let's say you're trying to open a restaurant in London, which, if you decide to do that after this talk this evening, and you try to get investors for your restaurant in London, this will be hard to do. And they'll say, 'Well, it's a bad business. No one makes money. Everyone just loses money when they open restaurants.' And you will say, 'Well, this is totally different from any other restaurant. It will be the only British-Nepalese fusion cuisine within a five-block radius of the LSE.' And so you sort of tell an idiosyncratic fictional story where it's too small. And so because people are constantly telling these fictional stories that distort what's going on, there is this real failure to understand the centrality of this monopoly versus competition dichotomy.

But I think it's not just an intellectual failure. I think it is also sort of a psychological failure. And I think that there's something where we find competition strangely reassuring. We find it validating. And when you compete for things, you think there are lots of people doing it, and there sort of is this perception of safety in crowds. If a lot of people are trying to get something, it must be valuable. And therefore, you want it. Whereas if nobody's trying to do something, that's already really, really uncomfortable. And I think the word 'ape', already in the time of Shakespeare, meant both primate and to imitate. And there is this rather disturbing aspect of human nature where people are ape-like, sheep-like, lemming-like,

unbelievably herd-like, and we're sort of attracted to doing things that other people do. We're attracted to compete for all these and compete the most intensely for things that often matter the least. And, you know, what competition does is it does make you better at whatever you are competing on. And I'll give the high school athletics—you're on, like, a swim team in high school, and you will focus on the other people on your swim team and you will get to be a better swimmer. It always comes at the price of losing sight of things that are perhaps more important or more valuable. I think that that's always sort of this distortion. There's a classic Henry Kissinger line about his fellow professors at Harvard, where the battles are so intense in academia because the stakes are so small.

And you always think, on one level, you think this is a sort of description of insanity. It's like, why would the battles be so intense if there's so little at stake? But on another level, it is just the logic of the situation working its way out. When the differences are tiny, you have to fight incredibly hard to differentiate yourself, and the smaller the differences get, the smaller the stakes get, paradoxically, the more you have to fight to get ahead. And so I do think we should always ask whether it really makes sense to try to go through the tiny, tiny door through which everybody's trying to cram through when there's a giant gate perhaps just around the corner that no one is even thinking about taking.

So, second contrarian idea in my book: people think of this question, "Tell me something that's true that other people don't agree with you on." Most people, there's sort of a default bias that this question has been largely answered. We've figured most things out, or if there are things we haven't figured out, they're incredibly hard to determine. So I sort of give this trichotomy in my book of: conventions, things that everyone knows to be true; mysteries, things that are just about impossible to figure out; and then there's the stuff in between which you could figure out, but it's hard to do, and that's a secret. So there's a question: how many secrets are there left in the world for us to discover?

And certainly, there are certain areas where there probably are not that many secrets left. So if you were living in the 17th or 18th century and you looked at a map of the world and there were these empty spaces on the map, you could become an explorer and you could discover something new on that map. Or if you were living in the 19th century, you could do basic chemistry and you could discover elements and fill out the periodic table of elements. And so, in the 21st century, probably geography or basic chemistry are not places where you will discover new things. The fields are done. They're closed in that sense. But there are many other fields, I would argue, that are still quite open and where a lot is left to discover.

I think this has certainly been true of, of the computer revolution for the last 40 or 50 years—computers, the Internet, mobile Internet—where many, many new things have been found. And I think it could actually also be true of many other areas of technology, where I've argued things have been somewhat slower, but they could be a lot faster. It's not just the world of bits, but also the world of atoms, where we could be making a lot more progress. I think one of the reasons people think that there are so few secrets left, or that it's not worth trying to find secrets, has sort of paradoxically to do with globalization. You know, if you're in a world with 7 billion other people, you sort of think there's nothing I can find.

It's like someone else will have already figured it out, or it's impossibly hard. And so it's either the case someone else will have figured out this problem, or it's impossibly hard. And in either case, there's no point in me doing it or even trying. And this sort of becomes a very self-fulfilling way in which people give up and do not try. And I think there is very often these great Zero to One companies have some core idea or research program or a set of things that people are really thinking about where they think there is something important they could figure out and understand. At PayPal, we were very focused on the intersection of cryptography and currency. Could you create a new encrypted digital currency?

You know, we didn't quite succeed in doing this, but by really thinking about that problem, it sort of focused us on coming up with some creative solutions in the payment space and helped us to build this company. And so I do think there's always this sort of passion for some, a specific vertical where you think you can discover new things that drives things. And I want to underscore that there are vast numbers of these secrets left to be discovered. It's not the case that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Maybe there was never any truly low-hanging fruit. It was always of intermediate height. It was always somewhat hard to figure these things out. But there's a lot like this that can still be done.

Let me end with a third contrarian perspective, something that's true, that I believe to be true, that I think a lot of people do not agree with me on. This is a little bit bigger picture. One of the things I contrast in my book is two modes of progress in the 21st century. I think we can have globalization and technology. Globalization I describe as horizontal progress going from one to N, copying things that work. And China is probably the paradigm example of globalization in our world. It's a very straightforward plan that they have for the next 20 years. Just copy things that work in the Western world. Maybe you skip a few steps, but it's very, very straightforward. And I always draw this on the x-axis.

And then on the y-axis, I draw technology vertical progress, intensive growth, doing new things, going from zero to one. And this is just to underscore this idea that technology and globalization are radically different concepts and that they should not be used interchangeably. as they tend to get used. And if we think about the history of the last two centuries, there have been periods of technology and globalization and one or the other, and they don't actually always line up. The 19th century, I believe, was a period of enormous both technological progress and globalization. After 1914, globalization went into reverse, and there was less trade, less connections among the rest of the world, and the world sort of fragmented.

Part of it became communist, on and on, although technology continued to accelerate in many, many domains. And then I would argue since 1971, since the Kissinger trip to China, globalization has restarted in earnest, even though we've been in a world that's been somewhat more limited in technology. It's been sort of this cone around information technology and the world of bits, but somewhat less in many other domains. Whereas the 19th century, we had both. The first part of the 20th century, we had technology, but no globalization. And the last four decades, we've had globalization with more limited technological progress. And this shift is reflected in the way that we talk about the world. In the 1950s and 1960s, the world would have been divided into the First World and the Third World.

The First World was that part of the world that was seeing accelerating technological progress. The Third World was that part of the world that was somehow permanently stuck. And today, we would speak of the developing and the developed worlds. The developing world is that part of the world which is copying the developed world and converging to it. And it is basically a convergence theory of globalization. So this is a sort of developing-developed dichotomy as a pro-globalization dichotomy. But it is also, I claim, an anti-technological dichotomy because when we say that we're living in the developed world, we are implicitly saying that we're living in that part of the world where nothing new is going to happen, where it's done, where things are static, where we can expect decades of stagnation in the years ahead.

We are saying that the younger generation should expect to have a living standard no better than and maybe worse than their parents. And I think we should—I think we need to resist this idea very strongly. We should not accept this idea that we're living in the developed world. And I think we should instead ask much more forcefully the question of how do we go about developing the developed world? Thank you very much.

Time for questions now. If there are roving mics, what I propose is that we have three questions at a time. If you can say your name and perhaps a word or two about who you are. You need to keep it related to, I think, what Peter's talked about. No pitches about anything like that. But let's—I think there was a hand up there. Yeah.

Hi, my name's Reed Roberts. I'm a chemist, so I've done my PhD, so it's not quite as bad as starting a restaurant, but almost. My question is, I think you mentioned Nick Bostrom towards the end of your book. Are there any ideas, sort of Zero to One transitions that you think we shouldn't be making? Can you see any that you think would actually be sort of net harmful to the world?

Okay, and we'll take—there was—okay, we'll take one here.

Yes, I'm Mr. from Oxford Sustainable Development. It would be interesting if you can comment on the relationship between entrepreneurship without any strategy. So I mean, you have this type of entrepreneurship, but you need to have a vision. So it would be interesting to know how Palantir is evolving toward—do you have a strategy in developing the Palantir technology? Thank you.

Thanks. I think there was one more on that side. Yeah.

John Dotts. In the Reddit AMA you did, you made a really interesting point, I thought, about scientific research being limited by Gresham's law. I wondered if that—if you see that also applying in entrepreneurship, both in investment and aspiration. Thank you.

Wow, alright, these are really cool questions. So let me, let me start with the entrepreneurship without strategy. So I am a big fan of people actually trying to have some sort of plan for the future, some sort of plan in starting their business and thinking where it goes. And the bias is always not to think very far into the future, because the claim is you can't know anything about the future. And yet, paradoxically, if you sort of do a discounted cash flow analysis of any of these companies, most of the value is very far in the future. We did this exercise at PayPal in March 2001. We'd been in business for about 27 months. We had a very high growth rate, pretty high discount rate, but growth rate's higher than the discount rate.

Under most of the models, it showed that about 3 quarters of the value of the company came from cash flows in years 2011 and beyond as of 2001. And that's roughly the math for almost all these tech companies today. If you look at Facebook, Twitter, all these companies three quarters, 80%, something like that of the valuation comes from money they'll be making in 2024 and beyond. And that's kind of an odd thing because so to evaluate these businesses, you have to think really hard, will they still be around in 10 years? And so I think one of the systematic mistakes people make is to overvalue growth because that's what can be measured in the here and now. And they undervalue durability, which is more qualitative.

But I think a far more important variable. And so it's always very important to think about durability. People always talk about the need to be a first mover. I think it's far more important to be the last mover. The chess analogies, if you're the first mover in chess as white, that's about 1 third of a pawn advantage. Last mover, you win the game. And so I think Capablanca, the former world champion, is one who said, you must always begin by studying the end game. So you must think about, how does this strategy work in the long run? So I'm always a very big fan of having some account of why a business is not just going to tactically gain some share or some customers, but why it will have sustainably high margins for quite a long period of time.

So I think you always want to have some sort of a plan. Are there any innovations that we should—are there any breakthrough technologies we should not be building? There probably are, although my instinct is that we live in a world that is a sort of a—we live in a culture that is a financial and capitalist age, but we do not live in a scientific or technological age. We live in a world that's dominated by hostility to science and technology as is. And this is true of most people in Western Europe, US, maybe throughout much of the rest of the world. It is true of people in government. It's true of the culture. It really dislikes science and technology as a starting point. The easiest way to see this is if you just look at the Hollywood movies.

They all show technology that doesn't work, that kills people, that's destructive and is terrible. And you can choose from a future that looks like The Matrix or the Terminator series or Avatar or Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It was like you'd never want to go into outer space. You want to just be back on a muddy island on this planet somewhere. And so I think this sort of extreme hostility to technology is somewhat exaggerated, somewhat unfounded. And so even though there are a lot of scary stories that can be told, I'm biased to discount them quite heavily because I think they're, they're sort of a product of this super hostile culture. And this is why, by the way, I think that Silicon Valley or entrepreneurship around technology is the true counterculture in our world today.

It is the most revolutionary thing you can be doing in our world is to be working on science and technology, because that is how you're really making a statement against the sort of dominant, sclerotic world that dominates us. If I had to pick a technology, I suspect if you built computers that are smarter than humans in every way, that seems a little bit scary. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. But certainly, if you were able to build generalized AI, that would be an event comparable to extraterrestrials landing on this planet. And that's perhaps one where people understate it. They always frame the computer issue as an economic one: "Will they take our jobs?" or something like this.

If aliens landed on this planet, people would not ask the economic question first. They would ask the political question: "Are the aliens friendly or not?" And so I do think there's some things around AI that, if it could be built, would be very strange. So that's one, with all the caveats, that I'd be a little bit nervous about. The idea of a Gresham's law in science is that there's always this worry that we have all these sort of funding mechanisms where, in many cases, the scientists have been replaced by people who are nimble in the art of writing applications for government grants, and that these two abilities are actually quite different. The people who are good at writing grants are actually not

the eccentric original thinkers who do the breakthrough science. This is sort of a very big worry I have. There's some dynamic like this that's been going on. One of my friends goes so far as to say that he believes the government's been waging a war of genocide against scientists, has been systematically replacing the so-called scientists with people who are good at writing grants but are bad at doing this sort of work. And there's obviously a version of this question in entrepreneurship as well, where are there people who are maybe just very good at pitching their companies and getting funding for their companies, but whose companies don't actually make sense? Are the great companies often started by people who maybe are somehow worse at explaining them, or something like that?

I do think there's a version of this, although on the business side, you know, you always have this very tricky combination of a technology and a communication of a technology. And I'm still a very big fan of the two-person founding team, with one person being the scientific or technological person and the other person being the salesperson, the business person. And this is very different, of course, from a university context where everybody's on your own. And you have to be simultaneously a scientist and a salesman, even though these two things are very contradictory. And I think the scientist and politician, it's like a philosopher-king in Plato: it's a philosopher's interest in the truth, a scientist's interest in the truth,

a king or a politician is someone who has a very attenuated relationship with the truth. And so combining these in one person is always a problem. In a startup, you can at least keep the two roles separate. And so I'm a big fan of trying to do that.

Okay, that's very good. Thank you. Perhaps we'll take some questions from the top. So we've got one over there.

Thank you. And we had one over here.

Hi, my name's Andrew. I just wanted to ask, what were some of the most interesting answers to the Peter Thiel interview question that you've heard so far?

Okay, and we have one at the top. Sorry, I'm making you run around.

In your book, you mentioned, you talk about, and you just mentioned about monopolies. Is it possible—and the idea behind this is to make profits that can help invest in future technologies—so can companies who make tremendous amounts of profit in a competitive environment or in an oligopoly, such as Airbus or Boeing, and in competition, like Apple, can they not innovate? And another one on: do you see any secrets left in the infotech field?

Thank you.

Okay, let me give some—I'll try to make this a little bit shorter to try to cover as much ground as possible. So how do we make sure that you don't create another bubble where everyone just becomes an entrepreneur and you have sort of this gold rush mentality? And so we have herd-like behavior in all sorts of cases. We have herd-like behavior in people becoming entrepreneurs. And so I do think this is always somewhat of a concern. One of my friends I was talking to a few years ago was asking, 'So what do you plan to do in five or 10 years?' 'Oh, it's really clear, I'm gonna be an entrepreneur.' And that's sort of like saying, 'I'm gonna be rich, I'm gonna be famous.' You don't become an entrepreneur as a line item on a resume.

You become an entrepreneur because there's an important problem that needs to be solved and the best way to solve it is by starting a new company because it cannot be solved within existing organizations. I try to surface the proper motives by—one of the kinds of questions I've always found to be very instructive to ask people are sort of the pre-history questions. So when people are just starting a business, the pre-history questions would be like, 'How did you meet? How long have you been thinking about this? Tell me how this sort of came together.' A bad answer to the pre-history question is, 'We met at a networking function a week ago, and we decided to both start a company.' That is like saying, 'We met at the slot machines in Las Vegas.'

We decided to get married. You might hit the jackpot. It's probably just a bad idea. And the much better answer is, 'We've been friends for three, four years. We've been talking about this a lot, and we're really interested in this,' where it's driven not by what the crowd is doing, but where it takes its bearings from some substantive area that you're really interested in. There are surprisingly few good answers to my contrarian question. It's always sort of a very tough one to answer. But I think sort of a category of answers that's at least better than average and sort of gets you sort of into the A-minus category maybe are ones where you acknowledge how your thinking is maybe not that original.

So it's something like, 'I want to do an education startup because education's important.' That's like hyper-conventional. Horrible, horrible answer. Almost all the things that are themes I'm, by the way, very against. I think education startups are bad. Healthcare IT is bad. SaaS is bad. Big data, cloud computing—that's like totally fraudulent. I don't think anybody even knows what that means. And the good answers are always sort of very idiosyncratic. But if you say, 'I'm going to start an education software, and I know that everyone's saying the exact same thing as I am,' at that point, you're already really far ahead. If you realize that you're not original at all, you are actually way ahead of a lot of other people.

So a pretty good answer I got along these lines was that, you know, most investors always think you should try to buy stocks cheaply, but I think that with a lot of these tech companies, you want to buy the ones where things are the most frenzied and you're just even more bullish than everybody else. And so you want to be—you want to be contrarian in a bullish way, not in a bearish way. And in my experience, there's a surprising amount of truth to that. The biggest miss I had was not investing in Facebook in the Series B round, which was probably the steepest up round of any company that I've been involved in in the last 10 years. And so there is something about when there's real momentum in these companies, people often still underestimate the momentum.

So I think that was sort of a very interesting sort of contrarian perspective. So yes, I think there's still an enormous amount to do in the IT field. It's been the field that's seen the most progress in the last 40 years. And as a default, I would bet on that continuing.

Thank you. I'll take some questions.

Hi, Peter. You've discussed quite a lot of the obstacles and what holds us back in terms of innovation. So a question rather from a wide perspective. If you were to design a religion that helps us get Zero to One, what would be the core values? What would be the main narration or the lifestyle model? Or, in another sense, do you think that what holds us back in terms of innovations is rather a social, kind of cultural questions than economic questions?

Okay, and just two down from you.

Something not quite like that, but I was going to ask you, what do you think is holding back those really big ideas in practical and physical terms? Is it the kind of cable thing? Is it just an energy thing? There's not enough energy to get enough data stored in a certain way? Or is it a physical thing in the world, whether it be an infrastructure thing? mental cultural social thing what are the things that are really holding uh big developments back particularly not in the i.t uh software field of which obviously you're breaking up thank you and uh the gentleman with the gray shirt

Hello, my name is Jeff Moore. I read your book, and in your book, you talk about the U.S. being in a state of indefinite optimism and Europe being in a state of indefinite pessimism. So I'd like to know, what are your ideas on how we can get into a state of definite optimism? What's the blueprint?

All right, so these are all questions of different versions of what's causing the slowdown, why are we not advancing more quickly, and what can we do about it? I actually think there are sort of like these—I often think there's this trichotomy that one can have. There's a question: Has there been a technological slowdown? So, what are the facts over the last 40 years? And that's sort of a complicated, long discussion. I think there has been. There's a lot of progress in computers, not a lot elsewhere, but that's sort of what I would say on the "what". Why this has happened is, I think, important but a very difficult question. My suspicion is that the why it's happened is very overdetermined.

There probably are a whole series of different things. There's certain things that have been regulated very heavily. The world of atoms is more heavily regulated than the world of bits. I think there's a regulatory component. I think there's sort of ways where, when things work, people try more. So because IT has been working, we attract more talented people into IT, and it has sort of a self-fulfilling aspect. And then, when there are fields where there's been failure for a long time, fewer talented people go into these fields. So I think why is somehow very overdetermined, and there's sort of a lot of different things that drive it. But I think the question of what should be done now is actually quite different from the why one.

And you can probably answer what you do now without fully having an answer to the why question. It's like you're sick. Why did you get sick? What are you going to do? The questions are linked, but you can split those three up. And so I think we can always separate the "why", what caused it, from the "what do we do". And in fact, I think people often spend too much time on the why questions. It's sort of an excuse for interminable debate, and it prevents you from actually getting to work on solving things. So my basic answer is the way you get back to the future does not involve some sort of massive social transformation or trying to create some new religion or some new political order or anything like that.

I don't think that's going to happen. And I don't think it's necessary. I think what it involves is you just working on making the future happen and starting. I had this debate in New York with, with this left-wing activist David Graeber who says, "You know, we're not going to build bases on Mars until we have a completely new economic system. So you have to start a huge revolution, get a whole new economic system, and then we'll be able to go to Mars and build bases on Mars." And I would say if you want to build bases on Mars, the way to really start doing it is you start by building bases on Mars. And this is sort of what my PayPal colleague Elon Musk set out to do 10, 12 years ago when he started SpaceX.

He started talking to various rocket scientists. How would we get to Mars? What would we do? And then you sort of start thinking about that and you sort of gradually build a company around that. The SpaceX slogan is "Occupy Mars," a little bit different from the Occupy Wall Street movement. And that's how you—and it's not a political or cultural or religious thing. And I think the more general thing I would argue is that because technology is so countercultural in our time, and if you're trying to build towards a definite future that's different, you have to convince a few people of that. You can convince a small number of people, you can start a new company, a small new company, and start going in a different direction.

It's much harder to convince large masses of people in our society. And this is why I think there's so much room for, for startups and why so much of progress will be driven by new small companies. There's no theoretical reason it has to only be new small companies. You could also imagine it being large companies or large nonprofits or large government agencies. But because we live in a world in which people, by and large, do not believe in the future as a definite concept, that actually limits the ability of large organizations to work towards a definite future. In the U.S. context, it would be impossible for the U.S. government to do a Manhattan Project today. It would be impossible to do Apollo.

A letter from Einstein would get lost in the mailroom in the White House. It would be treated as a joke. Who is this man who thinks you can do all this stuff that's so ridiculous? And you would never be able to sort of get the coordination needed to make something like that happen. And that's why I think progress will happen in small organizations. And if it can't happen in small organizations, it won't happen at all.

Thank you. I think we have one last round, and I'm looking for gender diversity. So perhaps the lady here.

Hi, Nandita Khanna. I wanted to ask you a little about your 20 Under 20 program. You've been running it for a few years now, and do you feel it's been a success? Is it only restricted to America, and do you think it has been a success? Could you tell us a little about it? Thank you.

Maybe somebody from, yeah, maybe that gentleman.

I just had a question about your value creation very far in the future and how it would apply to your stake in Lyft, because it seems that it would come after all the mistakes that Uber has done, and I would try to understand what makes you so confident that it can be a success where Uber has generated a lot of animosity in Europe and in other parts of the world?

Thank you. Maybe that gentleman here.

David Wood, London Futurists. I want to go back to your comment that all we need to do is to just get on and get things started and build a small business, rather than worrying too much about legislation and regulation. But aren't there examples of companies coming unstuck because of regulatory authorities getting in their way? And 23andMe, for example, or other medical improvements which aren't allowed to be brought to market because of offending the FDA. So isn't there a role for at least some change in the regulatory environment to enable this entrepreneurial spirit to fly more highly? Thank you.

All right, let's see. Let me start with that last question. So yes, there obviously are all sorts of things you can't do because of the regulatory environment. I think they're quite hard to change. And so we are always very hesitant to get involved in highly regulated industries. I'm somewhat hopeful that the stranglehold the FDA has on progress is going to weaken in the decades ahead because I think there's going to be more global competition. I think this is one of the really good things of China emerging. I think even Europe is an alternative to the U.S. I like competition between governments always, by the way. And I think that there is, and I think there has been, this very odd dynamic where the FDA has had a stranglehold on medical innovation effectively over the whole world.

And I think that may be starting to lessen. We have to, however, always also be a little bit careful about—I think the FDA's the worst agency in the U.S., and that's saying quite a bit—we shouldn't always blame it for everything that's gone wrong. I do think that a lot of the medical innovations have not quite worked, have been fairly incremental. There is a question with the genomic stuff, how well a lot of it actually works, how predictive it is, and so I think, even though I think it shouldn't be regulated as heavily, I do think we should also be pushing for just having much better innovations that simply work. I have to be careful what I say on Lyft and Uber. I'm very biased here since I'm an investor in Lyft.

So full disclosure, very, very biased. I think that Uber is the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley at this point. And there are sort of all these questions about what kind of behavior is appropriate in business and where you push the line. I'm not sure it will hit the wall in quite the same way in which Napster did in sort of basically going after everybody. But I think that my own sense is that Uber is right on the cusp of pushing the envelope about as far as far as it could be. And there certainly is one of the dimensions in which you can try to differentiate yourself is to be a more ethical company. And there are cases where that matters a lot. The 2020 program, I think, is tracking quite well.

We're in the fourth year. We've had 83 people started or completed. They've raised about $60 million in venture capital. A number of the businesses are starting to track towards Series B, $100 million valuation type rounds. And so I think there are definitely some things we've learned that we're going to be improving in the years ahead, but we've gotten sort of more applicants every year than the past year, and it's really been inspiring, the talented people that it's attracted. It was not really my intent with the program to sort of trigger this much larger debate about the nature of education and what is going on, but I do think it generated a lot of interest because there are these tremendous concerns about

What's happening with the university systems. And there's sort of a sense where people are incredibly heavily vested in this. And I'm on record as saying that I think we have a bubble in education in the United States. We have a trillion dollars of student debt. And it is a very tricky question. And part of the reason we have this bubble in education is because people cannot imagine any alternatives. They can't think of anything else to do. It's like you go to Yale or you go to jail. There's sort of all these different variations like this. And I don't actually believe that there will be a single alternative system in the future. I don't believe everybody should be an entrepreneur. I don't believe everybody should start a business in the 20 Under 20 program.

So I think there will be no unitary future. The analogy I've used is I think the universities today are in a crisis that's maybe comparable to that that the Catholic Church faced, say, 500 years ago. It's a sort of a universal form of knowledge. It's somewhat homogeneous. There are some small differences between people in different places. There were differences between the Franciscans and Dominicans. They had all sorts of debates. And you have this sort of priestly or professorial class that is costing more and more. There's sort of an indulgence set of systems that were set up. And you're basically told that the only way you get saved is through the Catholic Church; the only way you get saved today is by getting a diploma.

If you do not get a diploma, then you will go to hell. And I think the somewhat disturbing message that I have is that, like that of the 16th-century reformers, is that is that there is actually no institution that will save you, and that you have to figure out how to save yourself, which is not a message people want to hear, but that's sort of what I think people will understand that clearly in a post-education bubble world.

Thank you, Peter. I think we'll have to close now. Peter's on a very tight schedule. I'm sure you'll join me in thanking him for his ideas. Thank you.