Peter Thiel explains why all trends are overrated and one-of-a-kind companies are underrated

There's a version of this question that I often get about what are future trends in technology? And it's always a hard question, I feel, to answer, because you either give a banal generality where it's something that's so abstract, like there'll be more cell phones in the future, that's not very interesting, or you give something super particular, which is likely just to be plain wrong. What I always say about trends in technology, and I will also say about areas of study, is they're probably all overrated. So in terms of trends in technology, all trends are overrated. Education, software, healthcare, IT software, business enterprise software. Really overrated. If you hear the words big data, cloud computing, you should just think fraud and run away as fast as you possibly can. And the reason these things are overrated is because when you have something that can be reduced to a buzzword, it means that a lot of different people are doing it and they're somehow adequately differentiated within that particular field. The kinds of companies that I think are underrated and undervalued are the ones that are somehow one of a kind, that don't easily fit into some sort of narrative where it's hard to actually explain what they're doing by analogy. We're investors in Airbnb. So it's like you say, what kind of a company is that? And it's actually just a one of a kind new hotel lodging business, and it doesn't really fit into categories, but that really misses the uniqueness of the business. I. So I think great companies always have this one of a kind attribute. And I suspect if you're just in a big area of study where everyone's studying the same thing, you're not adequately differentiating yourself from other people, probably somewhat idiosyncratic vertical that you're really passionate, really interested in, and people aren't doing enough of that. So I think people are spending too much time studying the things everybody else is studying. They're spending too little time studying more particular things that they're really passionate about.