Peter Thiel on how to identify great talent

So let's say you're trying to select people for your Thiel Fellowships or maybe to work for one of your companies or to start a new company with. And just you, Peter Thiel, as the judge of talent, what trait do you look for in that person that is being undervalued by others. So the rest of the world out there, it's way too conformist. So there must then be unexploited profit opportunities in finding people. And if you're less conformist, which I'm very willing to believe indeed would insist on that being the case, what is it you look for?

Well, it's very difficult to reduce it to any single traits because a lot of what you're looking for are these almost zen like opposites. So you want people who are both really stubborn and really open minded. That's like a little bit contradictory. You want people who are sort of idiosyncratic and really different, but then who can work well together in teams. And so this is again sort of maybe not 180 degrees opposite, but sort of like 175 degrees.

And this is why you like Hegel.

I don't like Hegel that much. So I think it's. If you sort of focus too much on one or the other end of it, you'd get it completely. You would tend to get it completely wrong. But I like to get things where you get these kind of combinations of unusual traits. So if you have people with some really interesting, very different idea that suggests, okay, we're sort of in the idiosyncratic category, then the important question becomes, okay, would they actually be able to function socially and execute? And then maybe the teamwork question you'd ask would be, what's the prehistory of this company? How did you meet? How long have you been working together? And if there's a long prehistory, that would be good on the other side. So I think it's always getting these combinations right.