Peter Thiel on the potential problems with the Lean Startup methodology

There's obviously versions of both approaches that work. You know, having a minimum viable product by definition is probably the minimum what you need. There's almost an analytic sense in which that's tautologically true. At the same time, I do think we sort of tend to be dominated by a somewhat nihilistic bias where we claim not to know anything. And when you don't know anything, you end up defaulting too much to the sort of experimental search A B testing approach. What do we do A or B? Let's figure it out, let's ask the customers. And in the abstract, I would say the problem with that is that the search space is simply way too big. There's probably enough time in the history of the universe, much less before your venture capital funding runs out, to do a thorough AB testing and go through the full search space. So I think in practice the problems are not as purely empirical as people like to. I think it's often much better to have a good analytic framework. This is an important problem that needs to be solved. This is the set of things we have to combine in just this way to do it. And then once you've done that, there obviously are a lot of ways to sort of fine tune that. And that's where I think the A B testing approaches are very useful. So I think that there's definitely room for both. I would say we live in a world where it's far too skewed to the first and not enough to the mission driven, vision driven company. Yeah. So maybe practically have you invested in companies who had that big vision but then sort of pivoted? I think PayPal original business plan was to have payments on Palm Pilots, then it was wireless payments, then it was payments linked to email. So we had a few fairly big pivots in the first year. I'm not sure there's anything especially virtuous about that. If you have a dumb idea, it's important to change it, but it's not virtuous to have a really bad idea in the first place.