Peter Thiel on the importance of reducing internal conflict at a company

People always think that conflicts happen when people want different things. And I think conflicts normally happen when people want the same things. And so if you're sort of a sociopathic boss who wants to just mistreat your employees, the formula for doing it is to tell two people to do the exact same thing, and you will automatically generate a conflict out of nothing at all. And so I think there's always this incredible need to try to go the other way, to make sure that people's roles are not redundant, that they're well differentiated. And this is an extremely tricky challenge. In a small company or a startup where there's a lot of fluidity, the roles tend to change a lot. But the conflicts at PayPal or any of the other businesses I've been involved with always centered on poorly differentiated roles where there was a lot of overlap. At PayPal, David Sachs was the head of the product team, had this line which was that the product was a single, seamless whole, which was somewhat true, but was also this formula for never ending conflict, because it meant that the product team got to dictate things to everybody in the rest of the organization because everybody else somehow touched product. And so there was overlap and conflict with product almost everywhere. And so when you said that the product was a single, seamless whole, that was on another level was a formula whereby the product team was at war with everybody inside the company.