Calibrate yourself with the best

Peter Thiel spoke at Yammer tonight in San Francisco as part of our speaker series – inviting some of the awesome investors and board members we have to chat with everyone here.

One question that was asked was whether there are any tech clusters outside of San Francisco? There is increasing discussion now of New York, and within Australia we have the Silicon Beach.

Peter's response was that what really matters is 'how you calibrate yourself to the best'.

If you are in San Francisco with a tech startup you are currently around the best in this industry. People are so accessible when everyone is sharing a city – I was waiting for coffee this morning in a queue behind Jack Dorsey who invented Twitter as an example.

When you are in another city or country it is naturally more difficult to judge how you are going compared to the whole spectrum of the market. The caveat is in markets differentiated by their particular environment. In China you have walls both business and firewall so you in that situation you only have to be the best inside the wall.

If you have access to the whole market of the planet through the Internet then you have to be the best on the planet to define that space.

When you define the category you are the last company in that space.

Boom.

This note was originally written in San Francisco December 2011.