Ever Wanted to Ask PayPal Founder Peter Thiel A Question? Now’s Your Chance.

Peter Thiel is slated to speak shortly at the Distinguished Speaker Series at Oxford Said, UK and the B-School is crowd-sourcing questions that will be posed to the famed founder of PayPal, and early investor in Facebook and Linkedin.

Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, who co-founded PayPal and Palantir and was an early investor in companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn and SpaceX, will be talking at Saïd Business School on 30 April 2015 as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series.

In conversation with Teppo Felin, Professor of Strategy at Saïd Business School, Thiel will draw from the themes of his bestselling book “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future”.

Referring to the ability of a company to truly do something unique and innovative, zero to one supports Thiel’s philosophy that creative monopolies are a force for good and that the most valuable businesses in the world are the ones that solve problems in new ways rather than competing on well-trodden paths. Companies that try to emulate another’s success, or enter undifferentiated markets selling the same homogeneous products, will earn low profits and fail to succeed.

Thiel also proclaims that we live in an age of technological stagnation. Aside from rapid innovative growth in computers, the future hasn’t quite lived up to expectations, with developments in energy, clean tech, and biomedical treatments, among others, failing to provide advances that could enable our civilisation to rapidly progress to a better future. His message to entrepreneurs is that they need to create truly innovative startups in the world of atoms – not just digits and bits, and to navigate a future marked by globalisation in a world of scarce resources.

The event will be conducted as a Q&A with attendees and other interested parties globally, able to submit their questions for consideration in advance. These can be sent via social media: #askpeterthiel or via http://www.allourideas.org/askpeterthiel/

Here are some of the questions that have received top votes:

So witty, obnoxious, funny or downright weird, go ahead and post a question to Peter Thiel. (Image Courtesy startitup.sk)