Strong Personalities, Not Kool-Aid Drinkers
Thiel: PayPal had a relatively entrepreneurial, somewhat chaotic culture. A lot of very strong personalities. A lot of companies bias toward having people who just drink the Kool-Aid. There are pluses and minuses to both.
You'll have a more smoothly functioning company. Maybe less dissent when things are going wrong. We were less smoothly functioning. But a lot of people did feel ownership of the product and would raise their voices quite a bit if they felt things were off track.
We had strong personalities, not Kool-Aid drinkers. Less smooth. But people felt real ownership.
A Contrarian Time to Start
Thiel: In retrospect, 2002, 2003, 2004 were very good times to start new companies. A contrarian time to start an internet company. The macro timing was quite good.
2002-2004 were contrarian times to start internet companies. The macro timing was good.
Hard Is Better Than Easy or Impossible
Thiel: The overarching lesson from PayPal — which had a lot of challenges but ended up succeeding — the high-level lesson was: you can build a great company, but it's hard.
If you're at a startup that fails, you learn — it's impossible to build a great company. Try something less ambitious next time. If you're at a startup where things work too easily — like Microsoft or Google — you learn it's easy. Hard is somehow better than easy or impossible. Because if it's easy, you don't need to work hard. If it's impossible, there's no point in working hard. Easy and impossible converge to not working hard. Hard tells you — you have to work hard.
Easy and impossible both lead to not working hard. Hard tells you — work hard.