# Notes from Peter Thiel's startup course

After the 1999 crash, people in Silicon Valley overreacted and learned you had to do things differently to survive.

1. Believe and practice incrementalism.
   Grand visions and moving quickly fell out of favour.

2. Your startup has to be “lean.”
   You should not, in fact, know what you’re going to do.
   Instead, you should experiment, iterate, and figure it out as time goes on.

3. Zero advertising spend.
   If your growth isn't viral, it’s fake.
   Eg. PayPal paid new customers and paid for referrals, growth was exponential.

4. Anti-social was the new social.
   People wanted to withdraw into a new antisocial modality.
   Interact with computers rather than people.

5. Product needed elevation over business development.

6. Rapid monetization was to be distrusted.
   Better is a more protracted growth phase and later IPO.

7. You shouldn’t discuss the future. That will just make you look weird and crazy.


Bubbles arise when there is (1) widespread, intense belief that’s (2) not true.

To understand businesses and startups in present day, you have to do the truly contrarian thing: you have to think for yourself. The question of what is valuable is a much better question than debating bubble or no bubble.