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Obviously, Thiel didn't consider himself one of those doomed lemmings. But how does one find other nonlemmings? Just look for unusual behavior. In his book, Thiel notes with pride that "of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school." In our interview, he told me, "There …

[...] Rabois believes PayPal is a "perfect validation of merit" and of Silicon Valley as a meritocracy. "None of us had any connection to anyone important in Silicon Valley," he told me. "We went from complete misfits to the establishment in five years. We were literally nobodies.[...]" The early P…

For Trilogy's tenth anniversary, in 1999, Liemandt flew hundreds of employees to the Bahamas, where they stayed at the Atlantis Resort, and gifted employees crystal vases from Tiffany and bottles of Dom Perignon. When the first tech bubble burst, Liemandt's net worth plummeted, and in 2001 hundreds…

[...] Recall those brainteasers that Trilogy and other major tech companies used throughout the 1990s and into the next two decades. There has never been any evidence that they were useful in measuring who would be a good programmer. Yet it took until 2013 for Google to finally stop using them. "Br…

With Trilogy still in start-up mode, and Microsoft ratcheting up the competition for talent, Liemandt made a decision about hiring that might have been the single biggest bet of his entire career. He wagered that talented, overachieving students with zero real-world experience - that is, people lik…