One can imagine that being a successful founder requires putting razor-like focus on a particular problem until it’s solved, but one of the best judges of entrepreneurs says that’s not necessarily the case.
PayPal co-founder and VC Peter Thiel has said that the world’s best entrepreneurs aren’t specialists, but they’re good at a variety of things. “One kind of perspective for a lot of the world class entrepreneurs is they’re not specialists. There’s something close to polymaths,” Thiel said in an interview.
“And so if you have a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, he’d be able to speak with a surprising amount of understanding about a lot of things. He could speak about the details of the Facebook product. He could talk about the way people think about social media, the psychology, the way the culture is shifting, the management of the company, his ideas on that, and then how this fits into the bigger history of technology, and so. Whereas a sort of an academic view is often that you’re like a sort of a narrow expert on one thing, and that’s what you do. (But) what it is about, it’s, much more this polymath like intellect who understands all these different things,” Thiel added.
Thiel knows Mark Zuckerberg well. He had put $500,000 into Facebook in August 2004, giving him a 10.2 percent stake in the company. Facebook is today worth nearly $1 trillion, and this has ended up being one of his best investments. Thiel is also a prolific investor, and also has wins like Stripe, LinkedIn and Palantir in his kitty. Additionally, he runs the Thiel Fellowship, which encourages young founders to skip college and directly start their companies, which has seen successes like Oyo Rooms, Figma, Ethereum and Loom. As such, Thiel has plenty of experience in judging founders — he’s both been close to very successful founders, and has seen their journeys from just starting out to making it big. And if he believes that the best founders are good at several different things instead of just narrowly focusing on one field, aspiring entrepreneurs would do well and listen.