Nick Hutchison pitched Peter Thiel on a book about Silicon Valley's 1998-2002 boom, framing it like Lord of the Rings with competing actors converging on a shared mission. Thiel wanted to avoid dry business principles or random anecdotes, so Hutchison proposed using storytelling like biblical parables to embed lessons naturally, covering topics like viral marketing.
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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 one 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 board members who are kind of involved in strategy. You have investors, you have competitors. 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 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