Peter Thiel: Why will the 20th employee join your company? #startup #peterthiel

Why will the 20th talented person join your company? When they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google. It will look better on their resume to go to Google. Why in the world would they ever join your company? The monetary answer is generally not a good one. The 20th person doesn't get that much equity as a percentage. And so the answers that I think work are that somehow you are in a really unique business. This is the only place in the world where, where you can work on this incredibly important problem. And that's the kind of answer you want to give. It doesn't necessarily have to be scale or anything like that, but it has to, on some dimension, be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kinds of businesses that are unique when they work. They end up being leaders in their respective markets. And that's, I think, the general formula that works. On the other hand, if you do something where you have 20 other people doing it, even though it might seem easy to start, it's extremely hard to build out.