You're listening to TIP.

Pita Teel's personal net worth today is about 5 billion dollars and he remains active in numerous tech businesses.

The episode you're going to listen to here today originally at Back in January 2019.

And in this episode press the iinvestigate why and how.

Pita Teel is always inverting his thinking and why you should do the same.

Why vision there is thinking terms of tipping points of employees rather than a tipping point for revenue.

And why computers replacing people is an angst narrative that is simply not true.

At the very end of the episode press the i, answer a question from the audience and discuss how much value investors should pay attention to the bond yield curve.

So without further ado here are the lessons that we learn from billionaire Pita Teel.

You are listening to the investors podcast where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self made billionaires the most.

We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.

All right welcome to the investors podcast on your host Preston Pish and is usual company by my co host Stig Brodersen and like we said in the introduction were recovering everything Peter Teel today for people that don't know Peter he was an early investor in Facebook.

He was asked a question in reference to his early investment in Facebook and he was asked why you should have a specific strategy for your business and stick to it and this is how he responded.

And tremendous amount written in the last number of years about Facebook and the crazy Facebook history but I wanted to talk about one anecdote from the development of the company that I think was quite important and that it's worth reflecting on a little bit more.

And this question of how and bills great businesses was it just did they just stumble on this thing and it happened to grow and I think there was certainly some serendipity and luck around it but I also think there was a tremendous amount of foresight that I got to see firsthand in the company were already in the summer of 2004 there were ideas about how they wanted to build things out and how they envisioned this completely transformative social network that would be built over over many years.

There are aspects of it that varied and changed over time but in many ways the outline of something much bigger was already envisioned near the very beginning of the company when I started to become involved in the summer of 2004.

When you have a company that gets started they often have a PowerPoint presentation they will have a slide where they describe what the business is going to do and you have one type of company where it's well we can do many different things we can do A or B or C or D or E and you have a company where it's we are going to do A.

The company that says A through E is always worse than the one that just says A even though mathematically the opposite should be true mathematically you'd say A through E has to be better than just A but when you have A through E it means that you've not really thought through any of these things very well and probably they're all kind of bad and they have not been thought through well whereas if you have a specific idea it's a plan you can work against coordinating against measure yourself against and try to improve I used to play chess a glass.

I used to play chess a classically junior high school high school in the US and one of the intermediate level chess things you learn how to move the pieces and combinations and how to get to checkmate and things like that but one of the intermediate level things you learn in chess is that it's always good to have some kind of a plan even if it's a bad plan it's something you can measure yourself against versus having no plan at all.

So what are you trying to do you know something where you create options for many different plans is an anti plan it's a way in effect to avoid thinking about things.

The education question that looted to in the opening comments that we've come to think about is I'm very much in favor of education I think it's important I think learning is important but I think it's also very important to ask why you're learning what is it for and one of the strange paradoxes in the United States and many other countries that the education has become increasingly a status driven credential where you simply get it in order to get other things and it is I think the purest version of the indefinite future and you can think of things like that.

And you can think of things like going to business schools maybe the most indefinite version of education where why do you go to business school in order to become a businessman what sort of business doesn't matter if you had a specific idea that would actually be seen as a bad thing because that would be like you were too narrow too focused and so we just create all these people who have these these very general backgrounds and you end up with this paradox where what do you do at the end of your high school years don't know you go to college what did you do at the end of your college years you don't know.

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