If Peter Thiel were in Locarno: two opposite ideas of discovery

Peter Thiel is not among the guests of the 79th Locarno Film Festival and is not expected in Ticino. This article does not report a visit: it is an exercise comparing what the festival declares itself to be with what the American investor has written and financed.

The point of contact is a single word. Opening the edition, president Maja Hoffmann named as the institution's aim being the place where cinema becomes visible before it becomes visible anywhere else, and spoke of the courage to discover ahead of others.

Thiel has built part of his reputation on the same idea. In the book "Zero to One", written with Blake Masters and published in 2014, he argues that value comes from creating something that did not exist before, rather than from doing better than others something that already exists. The question he recommends putting to a founder concerns precisely the important truth that few other people share.

Where the two ideas part company

The difference lies in what is done with the discovery once it has been made.

In the model set out in "Zero to One", being first serves to build a defensible position, and the ideal position is a monopoly. In September 2014 Thiel published an essay in the Wall Street Journal titled "Competition Is for Losers", in which he argues that monopoly is the condition of every successful business. The advantage of discovery pays off if it stays exclusive long enough.

The festival performs the reverse operation. It finds a film nobody knows, and its entire apparatus exists in order to stop being the only one to have seen it as quickly as possible. The selection, the square with eight thousand seats, the market with more than four thousand professionals in 2025, the juries: all of these are mechanisms that convert exclusivity into circulation.

Locarno's value therefore grows when the discovery stops being its own. The value of an investment grows when the discovery stays its own for as long as possible.

From this follows a different way of measuring success. A fund judges itself by how much it earned from understanding sooner. A festival judges itself by how many of its films leave the festival circuit, and by how many of the directors discovered there go on working elsewhere.

The two logics are not incompatible, but they are not the same. An event that began defending its discoveries instead of handing them on would fairly soon stop receiving new ones.