Peter Thiel: Building a great company is hard but possible

We had a slew of talented people.

Was it the experience of working at PayPal create that group of people? Was it just a moment in time or was there something about the selection criteria in which you used? I don't know.

I think it was probably a combination of different things. I think it was a relatively entrepreneurial, somewhat chaotic culture. We had a lot of very strong personalities. I think a lot of companies biased towards having people who more distinct. The Kool Aid. And there's pluses and minuses to both. You'll have a more smoothly functioning company, you'll maybe have less dissent when things are going wrong. So 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. Certainly in retrospect, 2002, 2003, 2004 were very good times to start new companies. A contrarian time to start an Internet company, sort of. The macro timing was quite good. But I would also say the overarching lesson you learned going through a business like 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. And I think the lesson you learn inside of most startups is very different. If you're at a startup that fails, you will learn the lesson, it's impossible to build a great company, so you should try something less ambitious the next time around. If you're at a startup where things work too easily, which I think was the way most people say it, Microsoft or Google would have experienced it, you learn the lesson, it's actually easy to build a great company. And hard is somehow better than easy or impossible. Because if it's easy, you, you don't need to work hard. If it's impossible, there's no point in working hard. And so easy and impossible converge to not working hard. Hard tells you you have to work hard.