PhillyDeals: Business isn't science, PayPal founder tells those under 30

Peter Thiel - a founder of online-payments giant PayPal, the first investor in Facebook, and deal partner of Tesla Motors boss Elon Musk - disrupts and provokes. He pays smart tech kids to drop out of blue-chip colleges like Stanford (where Thiel went) and MIT. And he praises monopoly as the righteous goal of every thinking businessperson.

Germany-born Thiel, 47, gave the opening talk Monday at this week's Forbes Under 30 Summit, addressing 1,000 dark-clad young people at the Convention Center, only a few of whom raised hands when he asked if they'd read his book, Zero to One.

Business isn't science, Thiel told the crowd. No precision formulas, no reproducible results. "Every moment in the history of business only happens once. Mark Zuckerberg will never start Facebook again. Bill Gates won't start Microsoft again. Elon Musk won't start another Tesla."

So don't think you can learn all that in college. And only "crazy" entrepreneurs do goofy things like starting restaurants in busy cities like Philadelphia: With all the competition, it's tough to get paid, he said.

Companies worth starting offer smart solutions to problems no one else is solving. If you don't have one, you might as well be a CPA, he said: "Sane people normally do something much more conventional. For good reasons."

All businesses face pressure to cut costs and produce fast. But every founder, Thiel said, also needs to be thinking years ahead. Like they told him in junior-high chess club: "A bad plan is better than no plan. Just don't pretend everything's random."

That goes for America, too: Unlike earlier in the nation's history, most people now have "no definite idea of where we're going." We trust too much to luck, "the atheist's word for God."

He told Zuckerberg stories, how the then-22-year-old Facebook founder spent six pivotal hours convincing Thiel they should turn down a $1 billion takeover offer from Yahoo. "He was incredibly passionate."

Thiel produced two students he lured away from MIT to fund their companies. One had sobering news: "It's a lot more emotionally depressing and lonely" starting a firm outside the "bubble world" of college, said Bulgaria-born Delian Asparouhov, cofounder of Nightingale, which builds mobile record systems for autism therapy.

"We have to get away from this 'go to Yale or go to jail' approach," said Thiel.

Later, I asked Thiel if he really believes in monopolies. He made a sharp distinction between the good kind and the "Parker Bros." kind:

"Monopolies are good when they create new products for us. When Apple creates a new iPhone, that's a good thing. That's why we have patents.

"Monopolies are bad when they are static and not creative. They're just collecting rents. Like the troll at the bridge."

I asked where he classed Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp., which, for all its long dominance in metro cable markets, says it's not a monopoly, given all the communications technologies out there, and which is promising to build the city's tallest tower as its Innovation & Technology Center.

"Comcast is more like the troll at the bridge," Thiel told me. "They're not giving us great new products." Just collecting those rents, as far as he sees.

But, Thiel added, unlike many Comcast critics, he's not supportive of federal rules to enforce "Net neutrality" or police Internet pricing: "The government would mess it up even worse."

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