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“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
We could use less telegraphing of our intentions or ambitions and see what secrecy, patience, and planning might accomplish.
Seneca is the author you read when your life’s work has been destroyed,
He liked young writers with drive and wit, and a gift for pointing at hypocrisy and vulnerabilities that brought audiences quickly and cheaply. Within six months, Denton’s sites were pulling in more than 500,000 page views a month. Within a year, the blogs were making more than $2,000 per month each; within three years they were estimated to be generating at least $120,000 in advertising revenue per month. A little over ten years into Gawker’s run, its revenues would be nearly $40 million a year and the sites would have more than 40 million readers a month.
Denton experimented with different forms of compensation in the early years, but his most important shift was away from a raw number of posts per day (how many things can you make fun of today) toward page views (how many people agree with what you’re making fun of). Denton’s mind gravitates toward small publishing innovations like these. His sites were some of the first to post the view count at the top of the article. He notices that his writers obsess over this number, refreshing the stat counter over and over, and begins to pay them accordingly. He puts up a large screen in the office that
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“Give the people what they want,” Denton said, “as shown by data.”
At the moment we first find Peter Andreas Thiel in this story, he is forty years old and in the middle of an astounding rise. His path was in some ways traditional—Stanford to Stanford Law to judicial clerkship to high-powered law firm—but it was also marked by bouts of rebellion. At Stanford he created and published a radical conservative journal called The Stanford Review, then he wrote a book that railed against multiculturalism and “militant homosexuals” on campus, despite being both gay and foreign born. His friends thought he might become a political pundit. Instead he became a lawyer.
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“When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community,” future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, in a piece which formed the basis for what we now know as the “right to privacy,” it “destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.”
“Anyone who is threatened and is forced by necessity either to act or to suffer,” writes Machiavelli, “becomes a very dangerous man to the prince.”
There is something popular with ambitious people called the “briefcase technique.” You don’t show up to a meeting with a few vague ideas, you have a full-fledged plan that you take out of your briefcase and hand to the person you are pitching. Even if nothing comes of this plan, the person on the other side is knocked over by your effort, so impressed by the unexpected certainty that they cannot help but see your usefulness to them. Mr. A unlocks that figurative briefcase on the table: “Okay, I know what you think about Gawker, here’s what I am proposing. . . .”
Peter had seen many ambitious upstarts out of what Alexandra Wolfe called the “eternal freshman herds” of Silicon Valley. But Mr. A is different. Multiple people, describing him to me, borrowed Robert Caro’s description of LBJ as a young man: a professional son. Lyndon Johnson knew how to identify a susceptibility for protégés in older successful people and then make himself into theirs.
It would be a mistake to confuse Peter’s pondering Socratic-ness for uncertainty. His mind, for all its detours and considerations, ultimately meanders toward precision, the kind that calculates down to the ten-thousandth decimal point in ordinary conversation. He is the kind of man who might make a multimillion dollar bet without hesitation. It’s only if you ask him a question about an arcane point in Russian literature that you get the long pause of consideration. He wouldn’t want to just spout off. But if he thinks he has some deep idea about human nature, about the market, he’ll go all in.
With his first hire, Thiel’s conspiracy is stronger, by virtue of simply existing, yet it is also naturally weaker. This is the risk of combining with allies. The strategic benefit of adding a new coconspirator comes at the cost of substantially increasing the chance of getting caught. While you do want to find the right people . . . you typically want as few of them as possible.
In the business of bringing down Gawker, Mr. A was the president, Harder was the CEO, and Thiel the majority shareholder who expected his men to mind his money and find the returns he is after. This is the model he likes to operate. Early in the two companies he cofounded, PayPal and Palantir, Thiel would install strong CEOs and leaders. He relies on what might be called the plenipotentiary model—empowering trusted, skilled people on his behalf to execute the bold vision he has created.
A start-up is, in Peter’s definition, “a small group of people that you’ve convinced of a truth that nobody else believes in.”
“The truest way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others” is La Rochefoucauld’s maxim.
A coach who ordered a full-court press didn’t necessarily know for sure whether it would result in a traveling call or an offensive foul or a bad pass, but she certainly hoped it would. Police who are sweating a criminal organization from all sides can’t count on catching them throwing out evidence or making an unforced confession, but they know that does happen. No one can be certain of the effects of what Thiel describes as “long-term strategic pressure,” but very few people, organizations, or teams can withstand it.
