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Silicon Valley has “jumped the shark” and lacks innovation, venture capitalist Peter Thiel says.
“Perhaps there aren’t as many big breakthroughs left in consumer internet … The big ideas have been tried.”
Thiel, who had one of those “big ideas” in 1999, when he co-founded PayPal Inc.
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, and later was an early investor in Facebook Inc.
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, spoke Thursday at the New York Times’ DealBook conference in New York.
The Founders Fund partner suggested today’s Silicon Valley giants aren’t nimble enough to come up with The Next Big Thing.
“If you have breakthrough innovation, if you’re able to do something that’s incredibly new, that’s often something a small, or startup company, is better at,” Thiel told Andrew Ross Sorkin in an on-stage interview, according to Axios.
Thiel said Silicon Valley has fallen victim to groupthink, citing its politically insular atmosphere for his moving away to Los Angeles. “There’s a sense that the network effects that made Silicon Valley good have gone haywire,” he said, according to CNBC. “It’s not the wisdom of crowds, it’s the madness of crowds.”
Thiel, a Facebook board member and an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump, also said he did not think Russian disinformation on the social network made a “material” difference in the 2016 election, and dismissed special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation as “an insane wild goose chase.”
He predicted Trump would win re-election in 2020, as long as the economy is doing well: “The question will be: Is the economy in a boom? If so, Trump will get re-elected. If not, he will have challenges.”
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