He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor.

But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a “minimum viable product,” and iterate our way to success.

“Even in engineering-driven Silicon Valley, the buzzwords of the moment call for building a “lean startup” that can “adapt” and “evolve” to an ever-changing environment.

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