Here is an excerpt from an article by Cameron Albert-Deitch for Inc. magazine during which he shares his seven takeaways from what two innovative entrepreneurs have to say about everything from monopolies to artificial intelligence in their hour-long podcast conversation. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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What happens when two of the world’s most innovative and well-known entrepreneurs find themselves in the same room? Well, for starters, a seriously wide-ranging conversation. Netscape founder Marc Andreessen spent an hour interviewing PayPal founder Peter Thiel for an October episode of the a16z podcast.

Here are [three of] the seven biggest takeaways:

1. The eBay acquisition of PayPal was famously drawn-out and, in fact, took five separate negotiations to finally complete. After the fourth, it looked like there was “going to be this crazy eBay-PayPal war that was going to escalate,” but Thiel told the story of the fifth and final one: “In June 2002, there was this eBay convention in Anaheim. We managed to get a booth there even though they weren’t that friendly to us at the time, so we sent 30 people down to the convention. And we handed out all these PayPal T-shirts. They saw all their power sellers wearing PayPal T-shirts, and at that point, they decided to buy the company.”

2. The PayPal Mafia–a group of early PayPal employees–has spawned tremendous numbers of foundational businesses, including Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX, Reid Hoffman’s LinkedIn, and YouTube and Yelp. “One of the lessons you learned at PayPal was that it was hard–but possible–to build a great company,” Thiel said. “Most of the time, people are either in companies that fail–and then the lesson you learn is that it’s impossible to build a great company, and so the next time around, you try to build something that’s less ambitious, and then you certainly will not build a great company. Or you are in a company where everything works just phenomenally from Day One, like Microsoft or Google, where you then learn the lesson that it’s easy to build a great company. There’s a way in which both the lesson that it’s easy and the lesson that it’s impossible are equally wrong, because both lessons tell you that there’s no point in working hard.”

3. Thiel and Andreessen also talked management strategies. “Conflict happens when different people want to do the same thing,” said Thiel. “The challenge you have as a boss is to try to have people do different things. If you’re a sociopathic boss, you tell two people to do the exact same job and you’ll generate a fight out of nothing … The challenge in a startup is that there’s a lot of fluidity in the roles, and so people end up doing a lot of different things in ways where these roles overlap.”

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is best known as coauthor of Mosaic, the first widely used Web browser, and as cofounder of Netscape Communications. Later, he co-founded Andreessen Horowitz with Ben Horowitz, The two “super angel investors” are committed to supporting entrepreneurs, products, and companies in the information technology industry.

Peter Thiel is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager. Thiel cofounded PayPal with Max Levchin and Elon Musk and served as its CEO. He also co-founded Palantir, of which he is chairman. I think his book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, written with Blake Masters, is one of the best published in 2014.