Peter Thiel on the most important lesson he learned building PayPal

The early employees of PayPal went on to build incredible companies like Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yelp, Yammer, and more.

When asked about the factors that explain these outlier successes, Thiel suggests that it was probably a combination of several different things: an entrepreneurial culture, lots of strong personalities, and the early 2000s was a great time to start a company.

But Thiel also says that the overarching lesson you learned working at PayPal—which had a lot of challenges but ended up succeeding—was:

“You can build a great company, but it’s hard.”

He contrasts this to the lessons you learn at most startups:

“If you’re at a startup that fails, you will learn the lesson that it’s impossible to build a great company and that you should try something less ambitious the next time around. If you’re at a startup where things work too easily [such as Microsoft or Google], you learn the lesson that it’s actually easy to build a great company.”

He continues:

“Hard is somehow better than easy or impossible. If it’s easy, you don’t need to work hard. If it’s impossible, there’s no point in working hard. So easy and impossible converge to not working hard. Hard tells you you have to work hard.”

Full video: This Week in Startups “Peter Thiel on being a contrarian“ (Mar 2015)