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Peter Thiel's 4 Questions to Spot 20-Year-Old Unicorn Founders

Peter Thiel's 4 Questions to Spot 20-Year-Old Unicorn Founders

November 18, 2024

Hey Founders,

Happy November: there’s a new President in the USA. T-Pain and Zuck shipped the collab of the century. Your Bitcoin friend in the group chat is on cloud 9 again. LOI Alumni, Kaito, got acqui-hired by Coinbase. FTX slapped Binance with a $1.8B lawsuit. We had an 11/10 time in Lisbon at Websummit with Lauren D’Souza and 70,000 other startup nerds. 56% of you are already listening to Mariah Carey’s holiday playlist. 41% of you are prepping your BFCM deals. And 99% of you wanna refer a founder to our next LOI Founder cohort. 🎄

If that’s you, bless your heart. All you gotta do is send them this 5-minute form to apply or forward them this email and get them to click below…

Speaking of the holidays, LOI’s hosting festive meetups in December all across Canada next month. Save your seat below before it’s too late:

🎟 RSVP to the Vancouver Holiday Meetup Dec 17th (hosted by Jen Orr)
🎟 RSVP to the Toronto Holiday Meetup Dec 17th (hosted by Ve Sharma)
🎟 RSVP to the Montreal Holiday Meetup Dec 10th (hosted by Athiya Rastogi)
🎟 RSVP to the Calgary Holiday Meetup Dec 17th (hosted by Devon/Kelcie)
🎟 RSVP to the Halifax Holiday Meetup Dec 17th (hosted by Kyle Moore)

Don’t see your city up there? Email us to request to host your own holiday meetup this December 👋

Time to hit our Michelin start menu for the day:

Peter Thiel’s 4 questions to spot Unicron founders
Top reads of the week
Founder wins of the month
LOI asks
Some memes

Peter Thiel’s 4 Special Questions to Spot Unicorn Founders

Peter Thiel, the investor behind PayPal, has a knack for spotting future billionaires. If you want proof, look no further than:

Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX)
Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn),
Chad Hurley (YouTube),
Sam Altman (OpenAI),
David Sacks (Paypal, Yammer),
Keith Rabois (Square)

He asked these 4 questions to identify talent:

📌 What's something true that almost nobody agrees with you on?
- Thiel values independent thinking and the ability to be both contrarian and right. This is a key trait for innovation.
📌 How successful do you think you'll be?
- It might sound basic, but those who answer with detail and confidence are the ones with a clear vision for their future.
📌 Would you grab a beer with them after work?
- Thiel cared about building strong team chemistry. It’s not just about being personable but about bonding over shared goals.
📌 Do they have Zen-like opposites?
- Thiel looks for people who are curious, creative, and capable of balancing seemingly contradictory traits—like being both stubborn and open-minded.

Thiel believes the best people aren’t specialists. They're generalists deeply curious about everything from science to history — and those are the ones he wants on his team.

So the next time you’re thinking of finding a cofounder to work with, keep these 4 questions in mind.

📰 Killer Content of the Week

🥁 Some Community Asks

Sign up to watch our Labs Batch 13 founder pitch event: Wanna meet the best founders coming out of Labs batch 13? Save your seat here
Black Friday Promotions: we wanna promote LOI founders in our network that have Black Friday / Cyber Mobday deals. Email us at the button below to get in touch
Reach out to be a speakers: we have a few founder sessions coming up that are In need of high growth founder speakers. If you’re an alumni that has had a successful exit or raised VC funding and has a tactical skill you want to teach, reach out.
Request to be a Demo Day judge: demo day’s coming up soon and we’re looking for 2 more judges. If you are interested send us an email.

🏆 LOI Founder Wins of the Month

🤯 Kaito, founder of Utopia labs, sold his startup to Coinbase
K🛋 Couchhaus recently made their pitch on Dragons' Den. LFG! Send them a note to pass along your congrats.
🍝 Jake Dancyger launched a new restaurant in Toronto called Lardo. Email us for an intro to get a little something special when you show up to get a table.
💸 Kareem Abdur-Rashid, founder of Kare Chemical Tech, just took home a $5,000 grant from the black Innovator Tech Pitch

Blossom Social passed $1,000,000 in revenue and that gets us absolutely fired up
We heard Pharrell Williams give a talk at WebSummit in Portugal this week
LOI Venture, our VC fund partner, is actively meeting founders from the community to deploy $100K-$300K checks
Sharad Mohan (Trainerize) and Andrew Vilsack (Airbnb) gave some great AMAs