Peter Thiel says success rarely comes just once and that entrepreneurs can earn multiple shots at it if they keep iterating after missteps.
Peter Thiel Says Early Failure Is Fuel, Not Final
In a resurfaced 60 Minutes interview, the PayPal co-founder framed early failure as raw material for a better idea and not a stop sign.
"When we started PayPal, the initial product was an infrared-beaming device on Palm Pilots for sending money. It was voted one of the 10 worst business ideas in 1999. And 1999 was a year when there were many bad ideas in technology… But the team was good… It’s not like you get one chance,” Thiel said during a 2012 interview.
“You get many chances so long as you keep trying. If you get hung up on failure, and if you think you don’t have another chance, that’s when you really don’t," he added.
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PayPal’s Pivot From Palm Pilots To Email Payments
The Palm Pilot concept was real. PayPal's earliest demo let users "beam" dollars over infrared before the company pivoted to email-based payments that soon took off with eBay sellers. Thiel said the team's strength justified a pivot, one that accelerated when David Sacks arrived to help redirect the product and business model.
Sacks later described how he pivoted the product from beaming money on Palm Pilots to “emailing money on the web," a shift that sustained PayPal's breakout. His résumé at the time included a recent law degree and a stint at McKinsey before joining as COO in 1999.
PayPal's scrappy transition has become part of the "PayPal Mafia" lore, with alumni who went on to shape Silicon Valley finance and social media.
Persistence And Resilience: A Frequent Mantra
Thiel's take on "keep trying" echoes other business leaders' playbooks. Jeff Bezos has argued that invention requires frequent, “high-quality failures“, writing that as companies grow, "the size of your failed experiments" must scale, too.
Similarly, former Shark Tank entrepreneur Mark Cuban says the scoreboard only needs one right answer. "It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. You only have to be right once," and adds, "You can’t be afraid to fail. In fact, you have to be willing to fail to succeed."
Photo Courtesy: Mark Reinstein on Shutterstock.com
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