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. A good answer must be true, important, and unpopular at the same time, and most people can manage only two of the three: an unpopular falsehood, a popular truth, or a true thing nobody would bother to disagree with. 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 former pharmacist in Konya was told by every advisor that the opportunity was an online pharmacy marketplace. Her contrarian answer was that pharmacies did not need more customers; they needed to stop losing money on expired stock, a problem no one built for because it was unglamorous. That answer, which few agreed with, became a company that the marketplace idea, which everyone agreed with, never 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.