Nagib G. Mimassi

Peter Thiel on what he doesn’t like about the Lean Startup Thiel believes there are merits to the Lean Startup, but he thinks founders today may have over-indexed on it: “I do think we tend to be dominated by a somewhat nihilistic bias where we claim not to know anything. And when you don’t know anything, you end up defaulting too much to the experimental search, A/B testing approach of ‘Let’s ask the customers.’ And I would say the problem with that is that the search space is simply way too big.” In practice, Thiel argues for a more definite view of the future: “This is an important problem that needs to be solved, and this is the set of things we have to combine in just this way to do it.” To be fair, Steve Blank—who pioneered the Lean Startup methodology—isn’t necessarily against this approach. Blank just recommends treating your assumptions as “a series of untested hypotheses.” But there’s clearly a balance between having a definite view of the future and rigorously trying to disprove your assumptions. As Thiel explains, many of the PayPal founding team’s initial assumptions were wrong: “At PayPal, our original business plan was to have payments on Palm Pilots, then it was wireless payments, then it was payments linked to email. So we had a few fairly big pivots in the first year. I’m not sure there’s anything especially virtuous about that — if you have a dumb idea, it’s important to change it — but it’s not virtuous to have a really bad idea in the first place.” Video source: @OxfordSBS (2015)