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- Peter Thiel: world-class entrepreneurs are typically polymaths
Peter Thiel: world-class entrepreneurs are typically polymaths
“I think that one kind of perspective for a lot of the world-class entrepreneurs is that they’re not specialists. They’re something closer to polymaths.”
Thiel continues:
“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 can speak about the details of the Facebook product. He can talk about the way people think about social media, the psychology, the way the culture is shifting. Management of the company - he has ideas on that. He has ideas on how [Facebook] fits into the bigger history of technology.”
Thiel then contrasts this to a more typical academic view:
“The academic view is that you’re sort of a narrow expert on one thing and that’s what you do. But it’s much more this polymath-like intellect that understands all these different things.”