{"id":10021,"date":"2022-09-28T10:00:16","date_gmt":"2022-09-28T04:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/?p=10021"},"modified":"2023-08-28T14:22:54","modified_gmt":"2023-08-28T08:52:54","slug":"10-best-answers-for-peter-thiel-interview-question-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/28\/10-best-answers-for-peter-thiel-interview-question-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Best Answers For Peter Thiel Interview Question &#8211; Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <a href=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/14\/10-best-answers-for-peter-thiel-interview-question-part-1\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">10 Best Answers For Peter Thiel Interview Question \u2013 Part 1<\/a>, I gave five answers to the following Peter Thiel interview question:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What is the one thing that&#8217;s true but nobody believes it when you tell them?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In this second part, I&#8217;ll give five more.<\/p>\n<p>Here goes.<\/p>\n<p><strong>#6. Fixed deposit beats inflation<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/GTM360\/status\/1494288085949026306\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Matt Levine<\/a> once said:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One way to do fraud when you are pitching an investment is to lie about the investment. Another way is to lie about the alternatives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I see this all the time in investment products sales.<\/p>\n<p>In a bid to sell mutual funds and other financial products on which they earn fat commissions, distributors claim that fixed deposit &#8211; the alternative financial product on which they don&#8217;t earn any commission &#8211; trails inflation.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a lie.<\/p>\n<p>According to <em>ET Wealth<\/em> edition dated 25 July 2022, FD has beaten inflation during the last 10 years.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/fixed-deposit-beats-inflation-etwealth-25jul2022-fi.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-10003 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/fixed-deposit-beats-inflation-etwealth-25jul2022-fi.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"445\" srcset=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/fixed-deposit-beats-inflation-etwealth-25jul2022-fi.jpg 630w, https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/fixed-deposit-beats-inflation-etwealth-25jul2022-fi-200x141.jpg 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>#7. Fixed deposit beats equity in the long term<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Fixed deposit has consistently outperformed even equity over the long term. See <a title=\"Equity Always Underperforms Fixed Deposits\" href=\"https:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/01\/equity-always-underperforms-fixed-deposits\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"bookmark noopener\">Equity Always Underperforms Fixed Deposits<\/a> for more details.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">I&#39;ve been doing this for a year. <br \/>When I last checked my portfolio, only 3 scrips were above water. All 3 are index ETFs.<br \/>If you&#39;re sure of beating the index, you should make billions by running a hedge fund instead of being a retail investor.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/s_ketharaman\/status\/1521795294534717440?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">May 4, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p><strong>#8. My Google ID is not my Gmail Address<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I signed up for Google Ads, Google Adsense, Google Analytics, and Google Drive before Gmail was launched.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, I signed up for YouTube before it was even acquired by Google.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, my IDs for many Google products are not Gmail.<\/p>\n<p>People who registered for Google Drive and other Google products after signing up for Gmail find this hard to believe.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/skr-google-accounts.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-10004 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/skr-google-accounts-200x163.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"163\" srcset=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/skr-google-accounts-200x163.jpg 200w, https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/skr-google-accounts.jpg 435w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><\/a>But, as you can see from the exhibit on the right, I&#8217;m not fibbing. s.ketharaman@gtm360.com is indeed my ID for Google Analytics and Google Drive (This account does not run on Google Mail).<\/p>\n<p>While on the subject, I signed up for Google Ads with info@gtm360.com (Google is not the Email Service Provider for this account, either). For years, I&#8217;ve logged in with this address. I still do but Google has recently started showing another email &#8211; infoatgtm360@gmail.com &#8211; on my Google Ads dashboard.<\/p>\n<p>This gmail account must be serving some internal purpose within Google since I&#8217;ve never logged in to it and Google Ads continues to send all updates to info@gtm360.com.<\/p>\n<p><strong>#9. People don&#8217;t get free healthcare in developed countries<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>People don&#8217;t get free healthcare in developed countries for nothing or in return for paying income tax. They get it because they pay for health insurance.<\/p>\n<p>Like all forms of insurance, they pay a fixed premium for health insurance whether or not they avail themselves of any healthcare services.<\/p>\n<p>See\u00a0<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/comparison-of-healthcare-health-insurance-across-different-countries\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Comparison Of Healthcare &amp; Health Insurance Across Different Countries<\/a><\/strong> for more details based on personal experience and anecdata.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">(1\/N) <br \/>It&#39;s your money, you can do what you want but, if you propose your India premium as representative of India as a whole, I&#39;ll vehemently disagree.<br \/>My numbers below, normalized to USD\/year: <br \/>DE: $18720 (&quot;Best&quot;)<br \/>UK: $5475 <br \/>IN: $1250<br \/>Big Mac Index = ~2X.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/s_ketharaman\/status\/1551233656102199296?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">July 24, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p><strong>#10. POS is free<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Many merchants would like to accept credit card because it&#8217;s a widely accepted fact in retail that every additional Method of Payment drives a sales uplift. However, according to the popular narrative, they don&#8217;t because they find the cost of POS terminal prohibitive.<\/p>\n<p>This is a misconception.<\/p>\n<p>As we saw in point #2 in <a href=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/14\/ten-answers-for-peter-thiele-interview-question-part-1\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Part 1<\/a> of this post, banks find micro and nano merchants very high risk and refuse to issue merchant accounts to them, which is why these merchants are unable to accept credit card.<\/p>\n<p>SQUARE solved this problem in USA by positioning itself as a merchant aggregator. More in <a href=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/2015\/11\/06\/three-ways-to-hide-your-secret-sauce\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"bookmark noopener\">Three Ways To Hide Your Secret Sauce<\/a>. Ditto iZettle in UK and EU.<\/p>\n<p>Actually, in the larger scheme of things, POS is virtually free.<\/p>\n<p>First of all, a merchant does not buy the POS &#8211; he rents it from the acquirer bank.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">At the peak of re\/demonetization, a govt honcho predicted that POS machine will be dead in India in 3 years. 2 years later, the count of POS has shot up from 1.5M to 4.25M. This is going to be the most harebrained prediction of all times! <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/aDtFMsXQwr\">https:\/\/t.co\/aDtFMsXQwr<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; GTM360 (@GTM360) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/GTM360\/status\/1193868594720968704?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 11, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Secondly, the acquirer bank waives the rental if the merchant bills over a certain amount on credit card in a month. Over the years, I&#8217;ve spoken to around 100 stores about their POS cost. 99 of them hit the billing threshold in the very first 4-5 days of the month, and have never paid rental for their POS terminals. The sole exception is a small time grocery store in my housing complex.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Agreed. Even in India, where penetration of A2A RTP (UPI) is 10X that of Credit Card, I know only 1 merchant who has stopped accepting Credit Card in 5 years of UPI. <br \/>Apparently, Merchants believe that each additional MOP provides a sales uplift.<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/9fNsOCRHqr\">https:\/\/t.co\/9fNsOCRHqr<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/s_ketharaman\/status\/1560258261151916033?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 18, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>A lot of people are saying that the NPCI&#8217;s recent move to allow credit card to be added as a funding source to UPI will give a big boost to credit card volumes since merchants don&#8217;t need a POS to accept UPI payments, which are typically made by scanning a QR code at the merchant establishment.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t buy this.<\/p>\n<p>For one, as we saw above, POS is virtually free.<\/p>\n<p>For another, <em>BharatQR<\/em> replaced POS with QR code for accepting credit card payments three years ago but failed to gather much traction.<\/p>\n<hr style=\"width: 70%;\" \/>\n<p>I cited <em>Nonprofit Company<\/em> and <em>Insider Trading<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/?p=9839&amp;preview=true\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/?p=9986&amp;preview=true\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a> as canonical examples for the Mark Twain quote that appears in the opening credits of <em>The Big Short<\/em> movie.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It ain&#8217;t what you don&#8217;t know that gets you into trouble. It&#8217;s what you know for sure that just ain&#8217;t so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I wonder if the ten responses to the Thiel interview question that I&#8217;ve covered in this two-part blog post can be considered as canonical <em>counterexamples<\/em> of the Mark Twain quote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 10 Best Answers For Peter Thiel Interview Question \u2013 Part 1, I gave five answers to the following Peter Thiel interview question: What is the one thing that&#8217;s true but nobody believes it when you tell them? In this second part, I&#8217;ll give five more. Here goes. #6. Fixed deposit beats inflation Matt Levine &#8230; <a title=\"10 Best Answers For Peter Thiel Interview Question &#8211; Part 2\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/28\/10-best-answers-for-peter-thiel-interview-question-part-2\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about 10 Best Answers For Peter Thiel Interview Question &#8211; Part 2\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":10003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9,1,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bfsi","category-ecommerce","category-mandatory-category","category-vc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10021"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11274,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10021\/revisions\/11274"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}