Joe Lonsdale explains the “one thing” rule he learned from Peter Thiel

So I want to start with lessons learned. You. One of them that we were talking about this morning when we were doing our workout was making decisions on blended reasons or having like a blended strategy for how you're. We're gonna win. We're gonna win doing these five things and why. That sounds like a good idea to the average person, but it's actually a very bad idea. Can you explain that?

Yeah. I wrote this piece online, like, nine lessons from Peter Thiel. I sent to all Palantir. That's been like, sent all to my other companies as well. And it's one of my favorite pieces, and that's one of them. And the, it's one of these logic things where usually there's like one reason that dominates everything else, and that's just, that's just the nature of the world is that, is that when something's successful, it's kind of like the power law rule, right? Like, in a venture capital, like, fund even, there tends to be one thing that successful that's like, bigger than everything else. And that's true inside of companies as well. It's, it's very unusual, like, extraordinarily unusual for there to be like two similarly equal. Like, like, like products or revenue lines or something like that. Right. Especially early on in the company. So usually if you, if you think you have like two or three reasons for doing something or five reasons for doing something, what that means is that you actually haven't figured out you have no actual reason. You have no strong, no strong reason yet. Yeah, like, that means you have five weak reasons, which is not good. You want to find like, what's, like one really strong thing you're driving towards and that, that's how startups work. And this is, it's a really seductive trick. I mean, first of all, you have to be taking a big risk to even do a startup. It feels like rather than like, you know, most people, a lot people, like, do incubators because they're like, oh, I don't want to do one company. I'm going to do 10 companies. And like, by the way, that's like, much less likely to have big success because you're not focused. And then. But so even within a. They're like, they're trying to do the same thing. They're trying to be like, well, here's five ways I'm going to make money. And like, no, no, no, man. If you really want to do a company, figure out the way you're going to make money and that. And that tends to be how it.

Works, you know, and that applies to revenue streams. So eight revenue streams means you probably don't have one awesome revenue stream.

Exactly.

Growth strategies. If you have seven things we're going to do for growth means you haven't.

Figured out which one's actually the one that's going to work, that's going to.

Just compound like crazy.

And it may change. It may change over time, but what's the thing that's working now that you're pushing on? Yeah.

And then the other version of that is blended reasons for doing something. I think I read once that Reid Hoffman uses the same philosophy, and he said, he gave the example of, oh, if there's like a trip to China, and I'm deciding, should I go to China? It's far away, it's going to take two weeks, and should I do this trip? He's like, my chief of staff came with, like, a list of pros and cons.

Yes. Like multiple pros.

Multiple pros and then a couple of cons. That's an almost impossible. It's a guaranteed way to make mediocre decisions, is to do long blended lists of if you don't have a key.

Reason to be there, like, stick to your work.

Yeah, exactly. That's what he said. He's like, if. If we don't have one reason that that alone is worth doing, then we should just say no. Is that something you do?

Reid was one of the key minds at PayPal, of course, with Peter Thiel and others. So who knows who actually came up with these ideas? It may all be Reid's ideas, and I'm recycling.

Well, I say the message for mine now, so I think.