Nick HutchisonFounder and CEO, BookThinkers

Jimmy Soni shares his experience meeting Peter Thiel

18 Nov 2022 · 2 min

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1:30

In this interview, host Nick Hutchison asks Jimmy Soni about his meeting with Peter Thiel, during which Soni pitched a book covering Thiel's formative years from 1998 to 2002. Soni frames the period as a "Lord of the Rings"‑style saga set in Silicon Valley, highlighting the interplay of board members, investors, and competitors as characters on a mission. He explains his strategy to blend compelling storytelling with concrete business lessons, promising to cover topics such as viral marketing and Metcalfe’s Law while also weaving in vivid personal anecdotes like a near‑death experience and a McLaren car crash. Soni emphasizes that focusing solely on business principles would alienate a broader readership, and he seeks Thiel’s approval for this hybrid narrative approach.

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I love to hear the fun stuff behind the scenes. And so in terms of process, you watched a bazillion videos, you went into this meeting. What was his reaction? Was it just like, yeah, sure, like, let's do this. Or, hey, you seem to know a little bit too much about me. You know that?
No, no, he was really gracious, actually. You know, we had a really good conversation. I basically pitched him. I was like, look, you have this interesting period in your life from 1998 to 2002, but it kind of like got not written about by a person who could interview everyone. Right. And I have this view that like you're all pretty removed from it. It's like Lord of the Rings, but set in Silicon Valley. Right. And he laughed at that. And I was like, yeah, but if you think about it with Lord of the Rings, like different people come together, right? And they have a specific mission. That's a fun way to describe it. Tossing the ring into the fires. It was like, that was their mission. This is a different thing. And you have different— you have board members who are kind of involved in strategy, you have investors, you have competitors. I was like, there's a whole series of things here. And I mean, I made the pitch and he got it. And so one of his questions for me was, how do you avoid falling into the trap of either just making it like a business principles book or just making it a series of stories? And I got a little anxious. I was like, there's a reason like the Bible is told as parables, as story. Often doesn't say like, here's the lesson, right? It actually does this like the story and the story is subject to like interpretation for thousands of years. Right. And so I was like, look, you can't miss the business principles. I'm going to write about viral marketing. I'm going to write about Metcalfe's Law, but I'm also going to tell the story of like the near-death experiences and the McLaren car crash and like all these other things that happened because you do both. The other thing I said to him is if you only do the business principles, you will lose a lot of the reading audience.