Peter Thiel, who gives $100,000 to young entrepreneurs to forgo college, spent an afternoon in front of a packed house at Harvard Business School. Thiel was at the school to promote his upcoming book “Zero to One.”
Theil is a Co-Founder of PayPal, first outside investor of Facebook, Co-Founder of the Founders Fund and Founder of the Thiel Fellowship.
Thiel describes the origin of and story behind the book, “Zero to One,” with the following:
“In 2012 I taught a class at Stanford called Computer Science 183: Startup, in which I told my students what I know about the world and how to change it. Blake Masters, then a law student at Stanford, took detailed notes on the class and posted them online. People read and discussed them widely, on the Stanford campus, and even in the New York Times.
Blake’s notes captured the excitement in the room, but there’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley. To start a wider conversation, we have refined and expanded on the best ideas from the class to make a richer, fresher, more readable text. Zero to One is about learning from Silicon Valley why and how the most valuable businesses in the world are the ones that solve problems in new ways rather than competing on well-trodden paths. We hope you enjoy and profit from it.”
The Harvard Business School Rock Center for Entrepreneurship sponsored the event that followed a standard Q&A between Sahlman and Thiel, followed by some text-in questions from the audience.