Course lectures "Startup". Peter Thiel. Stanford 2012. Session 11

In the spring of 2012, Peter Thiel ( Peter Thiel ), one of the founders of PayPal and the first investor of Facebook, held a course in Stanford - “Startup”. Before starting, Thiel stated: "If I do my job correctly, this will be the last subject you will have to study."

One of the students of the lecture recorded and laid out a transcript . In this habratopic, SemenOk2 translates the eleventh lesson. Astropilot Editor.

Session 1: Future Challenge
Activity 2: Again, like in 1999?
Session 3: Value Systems
Lesson 4: The Last Turn Advantage
Session 5: Mafia Mechanics
Activity 6: Thiel's Law
Activity 7: Follow the Money
Session 8: Idea Presentation (Pitch)
Lesson 9: Everything is ready, but will they come?
Lesson 10: After Web 2.0
Session 11: Secrets
Session 12: War and Peace
Lesson 13: You are not a lottery ticket
Session 14: Ecology as a Worldview
Session 15: Back to the Future
Session 16: Understanding
Session 17: Deep Thoughts
Session 18: Founder — Sacrifice or God
Session 19: Stagnation or Singularity?
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In the eleventh lecture talks about secrets. Are there any secrets left in the world or not? Disclose the secret you found in front of everyone or not? It will be a little about physics, terrorists, fundamentalists, conspiracy therapists, geography and psychology.

I. Secrets

Earlier, at the first lesson, we highlighted the most fundamental question that you should ask yourself constantly: with what important truth for you will only few agree? In the first approximation, the correct answer would be: "With a secret." Secrets - is a little-known and special in nature truth. Therefore, if you get the right answer, then this is your secret.

How many secrets in the world? Recall that if we translate our question into a business language, it will sound like this: what successful company has not been created yet? If this question can be answered with many answers, it means that there are many successful companies that could be created. If there is no right answer to this question, perhaps creating a company is a bad idea. From this point of view, the question “how many secrets in the world?” Approximately corresponds to the question “how many new companies should be created?”.

When you think about secrets, the key factor that needs to be considered is the answer to the question: how difficult is it to know the truth? The simple truth is well-known information. They, most likely, everyone knows. On the other hand is that which is impossible to know. These are secrets, but not secrets. Take, for example, the theory of superstrings from a physics course. You can't even organize experiments to test this theory. The most significant aspect of this phenomenon is that no one can explain it. But is it really very difficult? Or, in this case, look for any explanation - is this a fruitless undertaking? This distinction is important. Anything intermediate, difficult, at least possible to explain. Impossible to explain is impossible. Understanding this distinction will give an understanding of the difference between the launch of an enterprise, which will be profitable, and an enterprise that is guaranteed to end in failure.

Research is the process of discovering secrets. Secrets are revealed, that is, cover is removed from secrets. Pythagoras had a hard time discovering the secret of the triangle. There were many Pythagorean mystical cults that gave initiates new breathtaking knowledge, for example, knowledge of irrational numbers. But then this knowledge became well known.

But things can happen differently. Well-known information can again become closed and become secrets. It often happens that people stop believing in what they or previous generations believed in the past.

There are small secrets that are formed by increments. There are very big secrets. Some secrets - for example, rumors - are simply not serious. And, of course, there are esoteric secrets, such as the secrets of the Tarot cards and numerology. Unserious and esoteric secrets mean little. And small secrets are of little importance. We need to focus on secrets that mean something — big secrets that contain truth.

The purpose of this lesson is to reveal to you several secrets of creating companies and discuss them. The big secrets concern monopolies and competition, the exponential law and the importance of distribution.

"Capitalism and competition are antonyms." This is a secret. This is a very important truth, but many people disagree with it. Most people believe that companies are not much different from each other. They miss the big secrets of monopolies, because they do not look at them through the prism of human secrets that cause the secrets of monopolies. Monopolists claim that they are not monopolists (“Do not regulate our activities!”), But non-monopolists claim that they are monopolists (“We are so big and important!”). All this is just a demonstration of the desire to look the same on the surface.

The secret of the exponential law works in a similar way. On the one hand, this is a secret of a financial nature. The income of a start-up company is unevenly distributed - a consequence of the distribution in accordance with the exponential law. But on the other hand, this is a truly human secret. People are inconvenient to talk about inequality, so they either ignore this topic or try to give a logical explanation to this situation. It is psychologically difficult for investors to recognize that their best investments are worth more than all the other investments of their portfolio in the aggregate. Thus, they overlook or hide this fact, and it becomes a secret.

The secret of distribution also has two sides. Distribution is much more important than they think. And this makes distribution a trade secret. But it is also a human secret, as people who have access to the distribution, do everything possible to hide information about how it happens. Sales professionals work better when people do not know that they are dealing with them.

Ii. Next secret

Perhaps the biggest secret, greater than secrets regarding monopoly / competition, exponential law and distribution, is that there are still many important secrets. It was commonplace forty or fifty years ago. Everyone believed that there was still a lot of work to be done. But, generally speaking, we no longer believe this. And it became a secret again.

Let us again recall the initial question: with what important truth for you will only a few agree? It would seem that this is a simple question. So it is, until you try to answer it. And it turns out to be very difficult to answer it. Moreover, when people really think about it a little, they often come to the conclusion that it is impossible to answer it. They start at one extreme and then flow into the other.

But it is too big a step. The fact that one cannot easily find an answer does not mean that there is no answer. The correct answers to this question exist. Secrets exist. And their disclosure is neither simple nor impossible, but simply difficult.

Iii. Arguments against secrets

The general point of view is that there are no secrets left at all. This is a believable point of view. If it is wrong, it is not obvious. To give her a rating, we first need to understand why people no longer believe in secrets.

A. “Anti-secret” extremism

An extreme representative of this generally accepted point of view is Ted Kaczynski, better known as the notorious Unabomber. He grew up a prodigy. The coefficient of his mental development was 167 points. One of the best students at Harvard. Doctor of Mathematics, Michigan Technological University. Professor of Mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. But after Kaczynski became disillusioned with science and technology, he began a personal campaign to send out bombs. He killed 3 people and 23 more wounded. Among his victims were the owners of computer stores, graduate students of technical universities, genetics and others. In the end, in 1996 he was found and arrested.

However, at the end of 1995, the FBI did not even have any real clues in order to establish who the Unabomber was and where it was located. Kaczynski wrote a manifesto and sent it to the media, without specifying his name. The government authorized the publication of the manifesto, hoping that it would help move the investigation. And it worked: the brother of Kaczynski identified the style of presentation and informed the authorities about it.

But even more interesting than the way Kaczynski was caught, is the manifesto itself. In its content, this is a long, insane, diatribe speech directed against technological progress. Her key argument was that human goals can be divided into three groups:

Goals that can be achieved with minimal effort;
Goals that can be achieved by making serious efforts; and
Goals that are impossible to achieve.

It was a classic trichotomy easy / difficult / impossible. Kaczynski argued that people are in a depressed state, because everything that they have left is either (1) easily achievable, or (3) generally unattainable. What you can do can even be done by a child. But what you cannot do cannot even be done by Einstein. In short, the idea of ​​Kaczynski was to destroy modern technologies, get rid of all bureaucratic and technical processes, allow people to start everything from the beginning and give the opportunity to work again on solving difficult problems. This, in his opinion, would bring great moral satisfaction.

A less destructive option is the hipster phenomenon. Cool guys make some ironic interconnected statements against technical progress, and this makes it even cooler. And it's okay that the transmission and brakes on bicycles are actually very useful; hipsters do without them. This is something like a manifestation of stupidity on a larger scale. But many people in one form or another believe that there remains only an easily understood truth or truth that cannot be comprehended. It seems that they are trying not to believe in the existence of a hard-to-understand truth that can be comprehended with the help of modern technologies.

To a large extent, all fundamentalists think the same way. Take, for example, religious fundamentalism. There are many simple truths that even children can comprehend. And at the same time there are divine miracles that cannot be explained. And between them is a zone of complex truths - heresy. Fundamentalism related to the environment works in the same way. The easy truth is that we must protect the environment. Everything that lies beyond this truth, Mother Nature knows best of all, and her actions are beyond question. There is even a market version of this approach. Cost is set by the market. Even a child can learn the exchange rate. Pricing is an easy truth. However, such a truth can only be accepted, but not doubted. The market knows much more than you know. Even Einstein could not have foreseen the behavior of God, Nature and the Market.

B. Geography of secrets

Why did our society come to the conclusion that there are no hard-to-find secrets left? Probably the beginning of this geography. On Earth, there are no more truly white spots. If you grew up in the 18th century, then there were still many unexplored places. You could listen to exciting stories about researchers and travels to faraway countries, and if you wanted to, you yourself would become a real researcher. This was possible during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the National Geographic Society published stories about exotic unexplored places.

But nowadays you can no longer be a real explorer. Or, at least, it is now very difficult to investigate what remains unexplored. All that is possible has already been investigated. Maybe deep in the wilds of the Amazon there are still about 100 tribes with whom there were no contacts. Perhaps they can teach us something interesting. Or maybe not. In any case, most people do not really care.

The ocean remains unexplored, but in a rather peculiar way. 72% of our planet is covered with oceans. About 90% of the habitable ocean is deep sea. People have been there for research purposes for only about 200 hours. Thus, the oceans remain the last major geographical object, where people really did not look. But perhaps this is because our initial assumption is correct: there is nothing really interesting there. Studies of the deep seas simply lost the magic of discovering new lands and continents.

The frontier of knowledge seems to have disappeared along with the geographical boundaries. People are extremely pessimistic about the existence of the new and the interesting. Can we fly to the moon? We have already done it. And to mars? Many say it is impossible. What about chemistry? Can we excrete oxygen? It became well known in the 18th century. What about the discovery of new chemical elements? It seems to be a useless exercise. The periodic table seems fairly settled. It is probably impossible to discover anything really new in this area. Border closed. There is nothing more to open.

C. Secrets in sociology

There are four primary reasons for people's disbelief in the existence of secrets. The first is incrementalism, common in our society everywhere. It seems that people think it is right that changes should take place through non-essential consecutive steps. All the secrets we are interested in discovering are micro-secrets. Do not try to do anything difficult at school. Just do what is demanded of you, a little better than everyone else, and you get the highest score. This trend exists at all stages of education up to graduate school. Academicians stimulates the number of volumes, and not the importance of the problem. The goal is to publish as many works as possible, each of which, at least in practice, is new only in some small additional knowledge.

The second reason: people are becoming less and less at risk. Today, most people are afraid of secrets. They are afraid to make a mistake. Of course, it is believed that the secrets contain reliable information. But in practice, the truth in relation to all secrets is that they have a good chance of being inaccurate information. If your goal is never to make mistakes in your life, you should definitely never think about secrets. Thoughts that go beyond the thoughts of the majority will be dangerous for you. The prospect of devoting one's life to something that no one else believes is unpleasant enough. For you, it will be intolerable if you find yourself wrong.

The third reason is complacency. Today there really is no need to believe in the existence of secrets. The deans of law schools at Harvard and Yale each autumn give the same speeches to freshmen admitted: “You have taken place. You have entered this elite department. Your excitement is over. " Whether such complacency is justified or not (we should consider that it is not justified), but this is probably what is true if you do not believe in it. If you believe this, you may be in big trouble.

And finally, we are led away from secrets by a certain craving for egalitarianism. It is extremely difficult for us to believe that some people have significant abilities to penetrate the very essence, while others do not have such abilities. Prophets out of fashion. Anticipation of the future is viewed as madness. In 1939, Einstein sent President Roosevelt a letter in which he urged him to take seriously atomic energy and atomic weapons. Roosevelt read the letter and took it seriously. Today, such a letter, most likely, would have been lost somewhere in the post office of the White House. Anyone who opened the envelope would think it was a joke. In the late 1930s, nuclear weapons seemed to lie beyond the limits of the possible. But then the ideas about the future were taken very seriously.

In defense of secrets, it should be said that all of these reasons — incrementalism, risk aversion, complacency, and egalitarianism — affect most people well enough. Not trusting the prophets was a good heuristic practice. 30 years ago, people created cults. And other people joined them. Someone argued that he has some significant secrets that others do not know about. The guru or the authority of the cult was a model of anti-egalitarianism. People were encouraged to risk everything and join the cult, because it was the only way to the Truth. So, complacency and incrementalism were excluded. Today, most likely, it is impossible to create such a cult, which is good. People just won't buy it.

Iv. Arguments against arguments against secrets

So, there are arguments against secrets. But the arguments against these arguments are stronger. The problem of asserting that there are no hard to understand truths is that it is false. Secrets exist, and within reach. When you go deeper into this topic, the assumption of the existence of a society without secrets will seem very strange to you.

At some level, any form of injustice implies secrets. Something is happening. Something unfair. This happens because society allows this to happen. Most people do not understand the injustice of this. In any case, this is understood only by a small minority. In the 50s and 60s there were many different views on things that were extremely unfair. These secrets eventually became well-known information. Most have been defeated. In other words, the lack of secrets today means, in a sense, that either our society is absolutely fair, or we should not try to do it. Either everything is correct in the form in which it is. Or if any injustice exists, then it belongs to the category of the incomprehensible and cannot be eliminated. Any of these statements seems very strange.

From an economic point of view, lack of confidence in the existence of secrets leads to the conclusion that markets are fully effective. But we know that it is not. We have been facing extreme inefficiency in markets for decades. In 2000, it was impossible to say that people who create and work in Internet companies behave somewhat irrationally. In 2007 it was impossible to declare the existence of a real estate bubble. The market is impossible to understand. It can only be understood as it is understood by the Federal Reserve. Based on their existing model, they concluded that, in the worst case scenario, more than 25 billion dollars could not be lost. No one doubted the correctness of this model. And we all know how it turned out.

Political differences also require secrets. Any extreme criticism of the government’s actions is necessarily based on some secret knowledge that everything is going completely wrong. Some of this secret knowledge probably contains reliable information. However, the other, most part - no. But, in general, disbelief in secrets is equivalent to the assertion that no dissident can be right. And it ends in an interesting way. Since no one else believes in the existence of a secret truth, sometimes a political device is used, which consists in trying to discredit the other side, associating it with conspiracy therapists. If you are a Democrat, you resent the activists of the Tea Party and their secret beliefs. If you are a Republican, you are talking about participants in the Occupy Wall Street action and their wild theories. All conspiracy theories are insane and false. There are no secrets at all.

There is an interesting version of this phenomenon related to corporate governance. Let's take the drama of the last decade with the leadership of HP. The background is that HP has experienced a shift in the number of executive directors. In 2004-2005, among the members of the board of directors of HP, there were serious disputes about which board should spend its time discussing which issues. On one side of the dispute were Tom Perkins, an engineer, an honored veteran of HP, and vice chairman of the company, Kleiner Perkins. He believed that the board of directors should spend its time discussing new technologies and developments, that is, discussing difficult substantive issues. On the other side was Patricia Dunn, who argued that the issues of science and technology are too complicated and that they are outside the competence of the board of directors. Dunn believed that the board should focus on the processes and on whether everything is in order in the company's bookkeeping? Did they comply with all ethical standards?

Against this background, there is a very dubious acquisition of Compaq. Someone from the board of directors began to transmit information to the press, which was a clear violation of the due process. Dunn tried to find the source of the leak. Telephone tapping has been established. But it caused serious trouble, as it turned out that listening was illegal. This was followed by the famous series of incredible events caused by this process. Violations were committed, the purpose of which was to identify those who violated the rules of protocol conduct of board members who did not want to do anything, except to focus on the process.

Tom Perkins believed in secrets. Difficult, but still solvable problems exist, and we have to talk about them. But if you think that there are no secrets (that is, everything can either be reduced to simple processes, or it is impossible), you will come to about the same fiasco that happened to HP. It’s hard to work on a fundamental improvement in the future if you don’t believe in secrets.

V. Arguments to protect secrets

Of course, arguments against arguments against something are not arguments for it. If secrets exist, there must be convincing arguments explaining the reasons for their existence. So why should we assume that secrets still exist?

The fact that intractable problems are still solvable is evidence of the existence of secrets. It is not always possible to immediately say whether a particular problem is only difficult to solve or whether it is really insoluble. But those who solve difficult problems are people who believe in secrets. If you believe that there is something intractable, you must at the same time assume that you can resolve it. You will try to do it and, eventually, succeed. But if you think that it is impossible to do this, then you will not even try to do it.

A good example here is the last Fermat theorem. It states that for any positive integer n having a value greater than two, the equation an + bn = cn does not have positive integer solutions for a, b, and c. Mathematician Andrew Wiles began working on the proof of this theorem in 1986. He managed to prove it in 1995. No one could have succeeded in solving this truly difficult task if he had not considered it possible. In other words, you will not be able to make significant progress if you do not think that there is a solvable secret here.

The story about web 2.0 technology and the information age is a story about how a lot of small secrets at a certain level could unite and change the world. Easily make fun of Twitter. You are limited to 140 characters and numbers. None of the tweets separately does not matter much. Most of them are probably just useless. But in total, this platform turned out to be quite influential. Social networks, as they say, have played a significant role in significant political transformations and even in government coups. The secret power behind the growing influence of web 2.0 technology is proof that there are far more secrets than people think. If there is something that is significantly different from what exists in our extremely open world, then this simply means that it was previously hidden. In the part in which things are not visible, they are hidden.And all these little secrets add up and become something really very big.

A striking example is WikiLeaks. The line drawn by Julian Assange states that "New technology ... can give us practical ways to prevent or reduce the exchange of important information between authoritarian conspirators." Conspiracy in a broad sense implies the use of certain information, to which not all but only a few people have access. A significant flaw in this technology lies in the fact that as a result, more secrets than Assange wanted would be publicly available information. There are so many secrets that their content is not the only factor. Greater importance is precisely the order in which they are revealed. Will the secret that the government depose be revealed before the secret that would destroy the one who reveals it?

Vi. How to find secrets

A. Search Methodology

There is no direct formula that can be applied to search for secrets. However, there are certain reasons to suspect that there are still a lot of them. Problems appear when you are just trying to make a complete list of them. First, this list will be largely incomplete. No one knows all the secrets, as good secrets necessarily imply the presence of really real problems. Secondly, the ubiquitous distribution of a list of secrets would change their character: secrets would cease to be secrets and would become common knowledge as soon as people read about them and recognize them as true.

So you cannot make any exhaustive list. But what you can do is develop a good method or approach for finding secrets. We know that good secrets can be neither small, nor stupid, nor esoteric. Important secrets are great secrets that contain reliable information. Therefore, these are the first two criteria that should be built into your model. You can safely disregard anything small or false.
Here it is worth making a hard division of two different kinds of secrets. There are secrets of nature and there are human secrets. The secrets of nature relate to scientific knowledge and the world around us. The process of finding them means leaving the room and taking actions to ensure that the universe shares its secrets with us. Secrets concerning people are not like that. This is what they hide because they do not want others to know about it. Therefore, we must put two specific questions: what secrets does not reveal nature to you? What secrets do not people reveal to you?

You can talk a lot on both issues. But the importance of human secrets may be underestimated. It would probably be advisable to focus more on human secrets, since they themselves can be very important, and also can help us uncover the secrets of nature. What you are not told about can often give a clear idea of ​​what you should direct your attention to.

At some level, the secrets of anti-competition, the exponential law and distribution are secrets of nature. But these are also secrets that people hide. It is extremely important to remember. Imagine that you are conducting an experiment in a laboratory. But every night someone else comes into the lab and messes up your results. You will not understand what is happening if you limit your thoughts to the natural character of what is happening. It is not enough to come up with an interesting experiment and try to conduct it. You should also consider the human factor. It is the point of intersection of the secrets of nature and human secrets that is most interesting and informative.

However, a common prejudice is that secrets concerning nature are truly important. The secrets of nature are metaphysical. They relate to the fundamental nature of the universe. If you believe that these secrets are fundamental, you will come to the conclusion that physics is fundamental science. The study of nature becomes the most important of the things you can do. Therefore, it is well known that it is difficult to work with doctors of physical sciences: they know fundamental things and therefore believe that they know everything. It is unclear how many levels such a logic can rise without significant distortion. Does understanding of physics make you a great specialist in the field of family and marriage relations? Does the theoretical physicist in the field of gravitational forces more about businesswhat are you In PayPal, the doctor of physical sciences and a promising candidate for the position interrupted his interviewer when he did not say even half of the question, exclaiming: “Stand! I already know what you are going to ask! ”. But he was wrong. And he was not taken to work.

An alternative, poorly understood route is secrets that affect people. This may be political secrets. Or it may be anthropological or psychological secrets. In this case, you can ask questions and see where it leads. What things are we allowed to talk about? Are there areas that people cannot look into? What is explicitly prohibited? What is potentially a taboo or taboo? Finding secrets in this way, at least at the beginning, is more promising than trying to uncover the secrets of nature. But the secrets themselves are usually more dangerous. The secrets of nature are obviously hard to reveal, but, on the other hand, they are politically safe. In essence, nobody cares about superstring theory. In fact, our daily lives will not change if it turns out that this theory is correct.Human secrets are different. There are so many at stake here.

Let's take the secrets of anti-competition again. If you don’t know them yet, there are two ways you can use them to find out. The first way is human. You may ask: what can people who run a company hide? This will make you think, and you will soon realize that monopolists must pretend that they are small companies and that there is incredible competition on the market, while non-monopolists must pretend that they are big players with a constant competitive advantage. The second route that you can take is Economic Route No. 1, where the fact that economic profits in conditions of perfect competition diminish is a secret of nature. Any of these methods may work. But you get the result much fasterif you ask questions about people. The same is true for the secret of the exponential law. You can start with a quantitative analysis, understand the distribution of the initial profit and then proceed from the data. Or you can listen to what investors have said, think about what they cannot say, and wonder why they did not say it.

B. The search for practical secrets

Many investors investing in ventures are looking for a phased improvement — small secrets, if it can be called secrets at all. Founders Fund is more interested in finding great secrets. One way to start thinking about big secrets is to think about the main subjects of specialization that are not available at Stanford. For example, physics is really the main subject of specialization in all existing universities. So now we will miss it. The opposite of physics can be food. Stanford University doesn't do that. Existing universities will not give you the opportunity to specialize in nutrition issues.

This may mean that we groped for something. In fact, one company that the Founders Fund found particularly interesting is preparing something like the Manhattan nutrition project. Over the past two decades, most of the leading scientists have been engaged in research in any fields other than nutrition. Most large-scale studies were conducted 30 or 40 years ago. Currently, there is no motivation to study nutrition. Therefore, the business plan was to attract the six best scientists to the project in this area and introduce certainty into this problem. There is plenty of room for cultivation: people know more about the universe than about the human body. But unlike the real Manhattan project, which received significant funding because of its obvious military focus,nutrition research remained chronically underfunded. From this point of view, the study of food groups is a completely inappropriate choice. The pyramid, which tells us that it is necessary to eat foods low in fat, eat a ridiculously small amount of cereals and consume carbohydrates, is more like a product of lobbying by Kelloggs, rather than the result of scientific findings. And now we have an explosion of obesity. Proper nutrition is not a fruit that is easily picked. But we had reason to think about the fact that the right people did not have an incentive to look at this problem seriously enough.eating low-fat foods, eating a ridiculously small amount of cereals and consuming carbohydrates is more like a lobbying product from Kelloggs, rather than the result of scientific findings. And now we have an explosion of obesity. Proper nutrition is not a fruit that is easily picked. But we had reason to think about the fact that the right people did not have an incentive to look at this problem seriously enough.eating low-fat foods, eating a ridiculously small amount of cereals and consuming carbohydrates is more like a lobbying product from Kelloggs, rather than the result of scientific findings. And now we have an explosion of obesity. Proper nutrition is not a fruit that is easily picked. But we had reason to think about the fact that the right people did not have an incentive to look at this problem seriously enough.

Another direction of searching for secrets leads to biotechnology. Stem cell and cancer research are two significant areas of biotechnology research. Many people work in each of these two promising areas. But despite such activity, they are surprisingly little overlap. Stem cell research is very controversial and politicized: opponents of research generally consider them anti-scientific and political tasks to be crucial. Proponents of research are arguing fiercely with this and insist that stem cell research will unconditionally yield amazing results. The biggest problem of transplanting stem cells to humans is that they begin to divide and multiply. You get something a lot like cancer.Neither side of the stem cell discussion wants to attach much importance to this. And it is strange.Maybe there is a variety of carcinogenic cells that behave like stem cells, and research at this intersection point might be promising. Few have used this approach. The dominant view is that research and development is currently hampered by structure and policy. So this area can be a good place to find secrets.

Of interest are also environmentally friendly technologies. A very small number of environmentally friendly companies and investors operate efficiently. The sociological truth regarding all investments in clean technologies is that the latter are now in vogue. Humanity is concerned about the state of the environment. Investors and entrepreneurs are people too. Therefore, investors and entrepreneurs take on clean technologies to be able to make statements about environmental protection. There is an opinion that a certain part of the decisions to pursue clean technologies was due to the erroneous and confusing justification of this business. But deliberately confusing the issue was necessary. You can't say that you make x to look cool. To say that you do something because it's cool,by itself is not cool. Cool guys don't say they're cool.

So, what would you say if you recognized that all these green technologies are developing thanks to the unspoken desire to follow fashion? One possibility would be to completely abandon clean technology. But is it possible to profit from an understanding of the substance of the question? Could you start a company working in the field of environmentally friendly technologies, which would maximally use their dynamics and focus on the application for fashion? The answer will be yes. You could have founded Tesla, that is, what Elon Musk did.

From this point of view, Tesla is perhaps the most successful company operating in the field of environmentally friendly technologies in the United States. She creates the most elite sports cars with electric engines. There are many ways to make a decision regarding the promotion of luxury goods on the market. Elon's approach is to force rich people to support the research and development needed to reduce the cost of electric cars and bring them to the market for goods and services in the middle price range. And the key to the decision was that he did not ignore sociological truth, but used it as a starting point. In 2005, it seemed that the creation of Tesla was a madness. It seems that it was better to deal with panels with solar panels. Seven years later, Tesla turned into a fantastic brand.And Solyndra is not. As we said earlier, you are creating a monopoly business, if you can start with a brand and build a technology company based on it.

Often, taboos or forbidden areas can shed light on macroeconomic secrets. An example is the US trade deficit. With a current figure of about 4% of GDP, it appears to be unacceptable. But this is somehow not to say. First of all, the presence of a trade deficit is inconvenient for many people. If you believe in globalization, you should expect the trade balance to be positive. Instead, money flows somewhere upstream in the USA. If such a deficit is unacceptable, there may be several consequences. Either the import will have to decrease, or the export will have to increase. Increasing exports is more justified. Where do the US have the largest comparative export advantages? Perhaps in agriculture. Research in the field of agricultural technology is paradoxical for investorsinvesting in technological development, as agriculture is often moved away from modern technology as far as possible. But it is a good sign. It turns out that in the process of implementing our ideas, you can get promising developments in the field of agricultural technologies. Agricultural technology can be a valuable secret that can be missed if you do not think about what people say (or do not say) about the economy.which can be missed if you don’t think about what people say (or do not say) about economics.which can be missed if you don’t think about what people say (or do not say) about economics.

Another example is alternative control. Major debates in the United States take place around the issue of big government and small government, i.e. will the government do more with more resources or less with less. But both these positions seem absolutely stalemate. No one talks about the alternative: do less with more and more with less.
Suppose that doing less with more opportunities is not taken into account for an understandable reason. This makes no sense.But the option when the government can do more with a smaller quantity is very promising. Great performance at a lower cost, of course, is the definition of modern technology. Insufficient research of this sector is an ideological blank spot. People who are loyal to the authorities do not like being criticized by the authorities: we can solve any problems if the government is bigger. Anti-government-minded people cannot bear to talk about strengthening the government: we must focus our efforts on getting rid of it. But, despite the fact that the use of modern technology in the activities of the government can benefit everyone and give something like an optimal result, very few people want to talk about it.

The main problem here is to find what is difficult, but still possible to do. You need to find the border. But simply do not accept the definition of boundaries that others give her. Existing priorities and ways of thinking need not be your own. Think about what's going on and look for secrets. There are a lot of them everywhere. Just remember that not only nature hides them, but also the people who surround you.

VII. What to do with secrets

What should you do when you found the secret? The easiest answer is to patent it if you can do it. But what to do besides this?

A. To speak or not to speak

The main dilemma is to tell or not tell others about your secret. If you don't tell anyone about it, you will keep the secret. But no one will work with you. When you die, your secret will die with you.

Conversely, you can tell your secret to everyone. You may be able to convince anyone that this secret is real and create a team. But then he will cease to be a secret. And more people will try to compete with you.
What kind of secrets you have may influence your decision, reveal them or keep them secret. If this is an intellectual secret, it probably won't be a big disadvantage if you share it with many. The same can be said about natural secrets, albeit to a lesser extent. But secrets about people are completely different. Their disclosure can be very expensive. On this occasion, Faust says to Wagner:

Few, penetrating the essence of things,
And revealing the tables to
everyone , Burning at the stake and crucifying,
As you know, from the oldest days.

Human and political secrets are often very dangerous. Julian Assange will surely agree with this.

B. Secrets and startups

When creating a new company, the problem is to decide how many people and to whom it is to disclose their secret. This is largely due to a specific point in time. Rarely, when the right moment to disclose a secret right before everyone is the very beginning of the creation of an enterprise. But on the other hand, you can’t keep a secret to yourself all the time. The question of the correct timing is very difficult, but probably the best solution would be some kind of intermediate solution. Much depends on how you imagine the rest of the ecosystem. If you think you have a big secret, but that others are about to reveal it, you should take a chance. You need to act as quickly as possible, and tell your secret to everyone you consider necessary.

This is exactly how PayPal acted in 1999. After several unsuccessful attempts to create models involving the transfer of money using handheld computers, the company's specialists realized that combining money and e-mail could be very promising. It seemed like a really big secret. But, on the other hand, this secret did not look hard to reveal. Indeed, other experts soon came to the same conclusions. Therefore, the PayPal team quickly declassified and widely disseminated this information. Of course, this was not without risk. Those with whom you share secrets, instead of joining forces with you, can become your competitors. In June 1999, in an interview with Peter Thiel, one of the candidates for the manager’s position revealed a secret, sayingthat he should not have said: he wants to take Peter's place. It was a dangerous political secret. Peter, as it turned out, loved his job and wanted to stay in his post. The interviewee was not hired. A few weeks later, he tried to establish a rival venture.

The fraud problems faced by PayPal were also a big secret. Fraud is inherent in financial and banking relationships, but no one ever talks about it. Bankers do not like to go out in public and say: “We have hundreds of millions of dollars stolen every year, and we don’t know how to stop it.” Therefore, they do not talk about it. Instead, they include these losses in budgets and reserve funds and try to ensure that everything is quiet.

C. Small and loud against big and quiet

Today in Silicon Valley, there is an opinion that most secrets are small. You can get a slight advantage, but very soon your finds will be copied. To succeed, you need to achieve super achievements, and as soon as possible. The idea is to quickly reveal your secret and make an exponential curve of your growth so that no one can keep up with you. But, of course, it is worth asking whether there are other companies whose development dynamics will be much slower. Probably, there are many cases when there is no need to reveal the secrets right away. It makes sense to behave very restrained, use the secrets of production and unique experience and build a big business for several years.

It’s hard to know how many companies do this. Many companies that try to act progressively or grow very quickly are visible to the naked eye. But most people who have been working on significant ideas for a long time will be hardly noticeable. They do not release new advertisements every day. The greater the secret and the more likely that only you own it, the more time you have to develop it. People who are looking for great secrets are much more in the world than we think.

D. Understanding versus reality

Understanding the importance of secrets is important not only when creating companies. It is also important if you are going to work in an existing company. We know that, according to the secrets of the exponential law, companies are unevenly distributed. Distribution often happens two-tier: there are really great companies and there are many who do not work at all. But it is not enough just to understand it. There is a big difference between understanding the secrets of the exponential law in theory and the ability to put them into practice.

Imagine that you are looking for a job in a start-up company. You know that it is very important to get to the correct part of the distribution curve. You want to find a job in one of the leading companies. This may seem easy enough, as general information about the best companies can be found in the media and representatives of the technical community. It is believed that start-up company A is much better than start-up company B, which, in turn, is much better than start-up company B. In this way, you will try to get into company A and become a queue for an interview with company B, which you will leave as an alternate aerodrome, right?

Maybe.It works in a world in which an exponential law is observed, but in which there are no secrets. But in a world in which there are many secrets, the best companies must be hidden. The exponential law remains the same. But it’s harder to navigate here because people may wrongly identify the best companies. Your task in the hidden world is to find the hidden companies with the best potential. What potentially successful companies usually do not notice? Do not take the visible distribution from best to worst for granted. This is a fundamentalist point of view. The market, the media, technology blogs - they know everything better than you. You cannot find hidden start-up companies that need to succeed. Wow!

But this does not mean that you should apply in search of work in a little-known company. Esoteric truths are not what we need. But you should try to identify important truths. And they are often hidden.

We end with a quote from Tolkien:

The road is running all the way forward,
Where is she calling?
What is preparing a turn?
What kind of pattern?
Forward on a thousand roads.
Now another to step,
And I would b - turn on the light
Yes, sleep a little.

You have a long journey ahead. The road intended for you really never ends. But then, in The Lord of the Rings, there is an alternative version:

Or maybe a
passage arose around the corner. Which passage or cache?
Let him wait for us around the corner
Tomorrow we will come here,
Find a path to the height,
On the Sun or on the Moon!

The road is not infinite. It is possible that a secret gateway is already waiting for you around the corner, beyond which lies a secret road. Walk in secret paths.

Note: Translated by SemenOk2 . Astropilot Editor .