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Replying to @dineshraju

The core of Thiel's argument, the bit that's so haunting to me, is his implicit argument that a) yes, reality may be probabilistic but b) if you want to build crazy ambitious things, it's not useful to believe that it is — because you won't try as hard to make things succeed.

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I feel like poker is the counterexample here

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Success in poker doesn’t come from relentless execution and extreme resourcefulness in the face of failure. Thiel’s argument implies that isn’t really doable if you believe in hedging and taking multiple bets. (Whether it really is is something I’m not sure about).

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and

Something similar in Hard Thing About Hard Things:

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You should check out Annie Duke’s thinking in bets for a counter argument

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I’ve read the book, and Thiel’s argument still stands. Duke hasn’t really accomplished anything in a hard domain. And yes, while Thiel today can take multiple bets, he lived it in PayPal, where they nearly died multiple times.

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and

To couch this in the language of probability theory, in business (and in hard projects like going to the moon, say) there may be a 30% chance of success but preconditioned on you being all in. If you don’t have conviction and think in bets, the probability becomes 1%

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You misunderstand “thinking in bets” not to include going all-in. It absolutely does, and what’s more, it tells you how to find conviction and when to go all in

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Ok then let me couch this in Thinking in Bets language: in poker the way to win is to not go all in on a low probability bet. In the real world you should go all in on low probability bets, otherwise nothing genuinely new or innovative will ever get done.

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PayPal was not a low probability bet. It wasn’t even a low probability bet at the time, since we all wanted to pay for things on eBay. A low probability bet is your cousin telling you he’s heard you can make big money betting on penny stocks, or from this Nigerian prince

Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

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@kevinriggle

Having read The Founders recently, I disagree 😬 The book documents all the ways they nearly died — fraud, regulation, Visa nearly kicking them off the platform, eBay deciding to kill them, the dot com bubble bursting on them while they were burning cash due to fraud.

2:52 AM · Jul 25, 2022Twitter Web App

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Having worked in payments, all of that was Tuesday for the rest of the companies in the ecosystem. If you wanna play with the big boys you gotta wear your big boy pants—and yet it had been done successfully before, and would be done successfully again