Peter Thiel on Investing and the Singularity
June 16th, 2008 by admin
In an earlier post, I mentioned billionaire Peter Thiel’s essay regarding his vision for the future. I recently found a podcast with him on IT Conversations where he explains why the financial system is adjusting in an era of accelerating change and how to profit from this transformation.
Summary:
Thiel looks at how investing should adapt to a potentially all-or-nothing environment, where things can easily turn out “very good” or “very bad”. Thiel makes the surprising observation that singularities are not necessarily a phenomenon of the future. Rather, we have already been seeing singularity-aware investment behavior for decades in the apparently accelerating cycles of booms and busts. Starting from the Japan-hype of the 80s, through the derivatives boom and bust of the 90s, on up to the internet bubble and the Web 2.0 overvaluations today, Thiel argues that not all of these were odd episodes of delusional thinking, but rather some may represent peaks of clarity, in which investors saw the paradigm-changing possibilities of technological developments, but simply bet on the wrong horses.
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