Concept
The contrarian question
The contrarian question is Peter Thiel's interview opener, 'What important truth do very few people agree with you on?', and his test of whether a founder has a real idea or a copy of one.
Thiel asks the question because good answers are rare and revealing. The question sets a high bar: the answer must be true, important and held by few people, all at once. Thiel notes that it is hard intellectually, because what we are taught is by definition agreed upon, and hard psychologically, because the answer has to be something you know to be unpopular. The startup version of the question is 'what valuable company is nobody building?', and a founder who cannot answer it is betting that they can execute a shared idea better than everyone else who shares it, which is a competition, not a company. The question is also a discipline for the founder's own thinking, because most of what any of us believes we believe because others do. Answering it honestly means noticing where your experience contradicts the consensus and taking that contradiction seriously enough to test it.
A real-life example
A software engineer in Izmir had spent six years building booking systems for large hotel chains. Everyone in the industry said small family hotels on the Aegean coast needed better websites. Her contrarian answer was that they lost more bookings to unanswered evening phone calls than to their websites, because the owner was usually also the cook. She tested it by sitting at three reception desks for a week, then built a simple call-answering service. Few in the industry agreed; most of her first forty customers did.
How to use it
- 1Write your answer to the question in one sentence, and check it against all three tests: true, important, unpopular.
- 2If most people in your industry would nod at the sentence, it is a category, not a secret; keep looking.
- 3Test the unpopular belief against customers' past behaviour before you build on it. Unpopular and wrong is still wrong.