@StartupArchive_: Elon Musk: “Be useful… Stuff doesn’t need to change the world to be good.” Sam Altman asks Elon what he would work on t…

Elon Musk: “Be useful… Stuff doesn’t need to change the world to be good.”

Sam Altman asks Elon what he would work on today if he was 22 and looking to have a big impact.

Elon responds:

“First of all, I think if somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that’s a good thing… Stuff doesn’t need to change the world to be good.”

In college, Elon thought the five most important things to work on were making life multi-planetary, accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, the internet, genetics, and AI. But he did not expect to be involved in all of those things.

“At the time in college, I thought helping with electrification of cars was how I would start out. And then I put [pursuing a PhD at Stanford] on hold to start an Internet company in 1995 because there does seem to be a time for particular technologies… and I wasn’t entirely certain the technology I’d be working on [in the PhD program] would actually succeed. You can get a doctorate on many things that ultimately do not have a practical bearing on the world. I really was just trying to be useful. That’s the optimization. What can I do that would actually be useful?”

When Sam asks what the best way for someone to be useful is, Elon responds:

“Whatever the thing is that you’re trying to create—what would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect? So that’s why I think something that makes a big difference but affects a small or moderate number of people is great. As is something that makes even a small difference but affects a vast number of people… The area under the curve would actually be roughly similar for those two things.”

Source: @ycombinator (Sep 2016)

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.”

Source: @OxfordSBS (May 2015)