Peter Thiel: “disruption” is “one of the most horrible, overused buzzwords”

I don't think that your goal in starting a company should be to disrupt or destroy a big company. Okay. Your goal is to create a successful company. And this is why I'm very skeptical. I really dislike disruption as a buzzword. I think it's horrible, overused buzzwords. A disruptive person is someone who looks for trouble and finds it. The disruptive person in elementary school gets sent to the principal's office. You know, Napster was a very disruptive company. It set out to destroy the music industry. I think that you can argue they sort of succeeded at doing that. People got on the front page of Time magazine. A year later it got shut down by the government. So, you know, you nap some music, you nap a kid. That's disruptive, but it's not constructive. And so I think one shouldn't really take one's bearings from, you know, destroying existing companies. And certainly there are ways things can change. But, but PayPal did create a new payment solution. On some level it constrained what the card Companies like Visa, MasterCard, AmEx could do. On some level it extended what they could do. So they didn't like us that much, but it wasn't that hostile. It was not a zero sum disruption dynamic. And so I do think that in a lot of these areas there's room for growth and your success doesn't require large existing companies to fail someone on your own.