Consider the hipster: An interview with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel thinks that too many entrepreneurs today are incrementalists, content to simply tweak the familiar and stand on the shoulders of yesterday's giants, rather than undertake the hard work of imagining and building something completely different.

In Zero to One, his new book about entrepreneurship, Thiel posits that risk-aversion only partly explains this phenomenon. For some people, he speculates, it's a belief that the world has already been mapped. When you feel like the important problems have already been solved, why bother looking for a moonshot?

Thiel, however, uses his pen to castigate such notions as feckless and bereft of imagination. The only way to move the world forward, he argues, is for a multiplicity of "zero to one" advancements, which involve someone developing a new insight where one didn't exist before. Discovering a cure for cancer, for example, would count as a "zero to one" achievement.

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The alternative? Well, Thiel asks his readers to consider the Unabomber. And hipsters.

"Most people act as if there were no secrets left to find," Thiel writes, before pointing the reader to the long anti-technology manifesto written by the Unabomber, aka Ted Kaczynski, before his capture in 1996. Thiel homes in on a section of the manifesto in which Kaczynski laments that "modern people are depressed" because their lives are about doing things that are "either easy or impossible."

"Kaczynski's idea was to destroy the existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew," Thiel writes. "Kaczynski's methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all harken back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future."

Addressing such people, Thiel argues that if everything worth doing has already been done, and if it feels better to romanticize the tech-less past over the hyper-connected world of today, "you may as well become a barista and feign an allergy to achievement."

That's the flipside of his book's central conceit: that business in the U.S. only succeeds as a result of miracles, which Thiel sees as just another word for technology-powered "zero to one" breakthroughs. With technology, he writes, humans can do much more with less, similar to what Steve Jobs was getting at when he once described personal computers as "bicycles of the mind."

In an interview with The Week, Thiel explained that his motivation for writing Zero to One comes from a class he taught at Stanford, which tried to impart some of the things he's learned from the business world over the years.

"We're at a point in this country where this question about the future is an extremely important question," Thiel said. "There are all these examples of where certain ways of doing things aren't working so well. I think there's a question of how we go about doing new things. So the book is narrowly for people starting technology businesses, but it's also larger than that. There's a sense that the U.S., for example, has somehow gotten to a dead end, and there's a question of how we get out of this. That's why I think there's so much interest in Silicon Valley. It's sort of one of the few exceptions to this general sense of malaise."

Another of the key tenets of Zero to One is that every landmark moment in business happens only once. When a Larry Page and Sergey Brin launch a search engine that dominates the market, for example, people tend not to throw their weight behind launching carbon copies of it.

That's why Thiel believes a prosperous future involves more entrepreneurs racing to beat the competition in getting from "zero to one." And, naturally, Thiel believes technology can help pave the yellow brick road toward that prosperous future. It's a philosophy that underpins his entire career as a venture capitalist and tech executive, as well as his initiatives like the Thiel Fellowship, which offers students a variety of incentives, including cash, to drop out of school and launch a business.

Critics of his outlook say there's a darker side to technology's encroachment, which Thiel's own investments have illuminated to varying degrees. To cite one example, Facebook — in which Thiel made the first outside investment — isn't exactly the place where privacy advocates tend to congregate. And Palantir Technologies, the company Thiel co-founded that specializes in making sense of huge data sets, has clients that include the U.S. government. They have used its data-mining tools as a kind of all-seeing eye, which reportedly even helped the government track down Osama bin Laden.

The U.K. newspaper The Telegraph late last year called Palantir "the reigning champion of creepy startups."

"The negative tendencies of technology — I don't want to dismiss them at all," Thiel said. "I think there's a way in which technology is not an absolute good. The question of to what end people put this technology is always a very important one. At the same time, I don't think it's entirely neutral. I think technology is more a good thing than a bad thing. I think if we're going to have a peaceful, prosperous 21st century, it will require enormous amounts of innovation. There are seven billion people on this planet. Just to feed those people well will require innovation in agricultural technology in the decades ahead."

One of the reasons he thinks it's easy to imagine all the downsides of technology is because of how such things are portrayed in pop culture.

"I think there are many ways one could imagine where technology goes wrong, but I can't imagine a good future without technological progress," Thiel says. "We're skewed too negatively on this as a culture. In just about all the science fiction, technology is dystopian. You can choose between Avatar, Elysium, or the Gravity movie, where it's like — wow, you watch that and you'd never want to go to outer space. It makes you want to stay back on a muddy island somewhere instead. If you think about the history of technology, people are way better off now than they were 250 years ago. It's like — George Washington had wooden teeth, so just from a dental hygiene perspective alone you wouldn't want to go back to the 1700s."