The Golden Mean of Business

[This post first appeared on Cent]

What is a business?

There are a lot of common ways to answer a question like that.

My favorite answer, though, is from Peter Thiel in his book . 

This morning, after a funny discussion where I very poorly argued for a specific way of handling a particular type of issue, I remembered Thiel's description of what a business is.

Essentially, according to Thiel, every real businesses is a conspiracy, at the heart of which lies a secret.

You can choose to hold on to secrets so that nobody finds out about them, or you can tell the whole world. The golden mean between those extremes is when you only tell a select group of people, who then become your co-conspirators - that's a business.