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- Peter Thiel on why all trends are overrated and one-of-a-kind companies are underrated
Peter Thiel on why all trends are overrated and one-of-a-kind companies are underrated
Peter Thiel is asked what students should study in college. He thinks this is similar to the question “what are future trends in technology?”
“What I will say about trends in technology and areas of study is that they’re probably all overrated,” Thiel explains. “When you have something that can be reduced to a buzzword, it means that a lot of people are doing it and they’re somehow inadequately differentiated in that field.”
On the other hand, Thiel believes that one-of-a-kind companies that don’t easily fit into an existing narrative or trend are underrated. He gives Airbnb as an example—any existing category would miss the uniqueness of the business.
“Great companies always have this one-of-a-kind attribute,” Thiel observes. And he suspects that areas of study are similar:
“If you’re in a big area of study, where everyone’s studying the same thing, you’re not adequately differentiating yourself from other people… I think people are spending too much time studying the things everybody else is studying, and they’re spending too little time studying more particular things that they’re really passionate about.”