Peter Thiel on why a good idea is critical for starting a company

I don't think there's a right time to start a company. I think the critical thing is to have at least the kernel of a really good idea. If you say, what's the formula for a company? It's maybe some combination of, number one, talented team that works well together. So it's the internal dynamics that matter a lot. Number two, a good product technology, and number three, a good business strategy. And somehow you want all three of those to line up. And if you have those, you can have a great company. Even if you screw up a lot of stuff, there are all sorts of processes people focus on. And I think the reality is that most of the companies in Silicon Valley are somewhere between really badly managed to badly managed. And so if you looked at these companies from an MBA process or from like a Harvard Business School thing, there are all these things that are being screwed up in enormous ways. And it often doesn't matter because you have this. This kernel of a good idea. I was on CNBC back in September as part of this book promotion thing, and they spent all these hours trying to do these gotcha moments to get you to say controversial things. And they got me to say at one point that I thought there was a lot of pot smoking going on at Twitter, which was when I left stage. When the president of CNBC came up and said, I did a great job, they wanted me back on the show. I realized I said a little bit too much. But the larger context was, it doesn't matter. Twitter had such a great fundamental idea that whether it was very badly managed or somewhat badly managed, or whether you're in favor of smoking pot or against smoking pot, it just didn't matter because the great idea carried the day on so many other things. And then the more pessimistic version is, if you don't have something like that, it's actually really hard to make up for that, even if you get a lot of other details right.