Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Peter Thiel, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Peter Thiel quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 321 Peter Thiel quotes for you to read and share.
Thiel's law": a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed. -- Peter Thiel
A start up messed up at the foundation cannot be fixed. -- Peter Thiel
in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don't perceive it to be unjust. -- Peter Thiel
Forget "minimum viable products" - ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others' successes. -- Peter Thiel
Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. -- Peter Thiel
when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. -- Peter Thiel
high cash compensation teaches workers to claim value from the company as it already exists instead of investing their time to create new value in the future. -- Peter Thiel
Technology just means information technology. -- Peter Thiel
take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered. -- Peter Thiel
The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it's harder than it looks. -- Peter Thiel
Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it. -- Peter Thiel
The zero-sum world [the movie The Social Network] portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood. -- Peter Thiel
The optimism that many felt in the 1960s over labour-saving technology is giving way to a fearful question: 'Will your labour be good for anything in the future? Or will you be replaced by a machine?' -- Peter Thiel
The prospect of being lonely but right - dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in - is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable. -- Peter Thiel
In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). -- Peter Thiel
Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the '90s migration "from bricks to clicks" didn't work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate. -- Peter Thiel
In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable. -- Peter Thiel
My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. -- Peter Thiel
Just as war cost the Montagues and Capulets their children, it cost Microsoft and Google their dominance: Apple came along and overtook them all. In January 2013, Apple's market capitalization was $500 billion, while Google and Microsoft combined were worth $467 billion. Just -- Peter Thiel
Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition? -- Peter Thiel
You'll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it's important in general, but why you're doing something important that no one else is going to get done. -- Peter Thiel
I would not describe myself as a super early adopter of consumer technology. -- Peter Thiel
Monopolies are bad and deserve their reputation when things are static and the monopolies function as toll collectors ... But I think they're quite positive when they're dynamic and do something new. -- Peter Thiel
People always say you should live your life as if it were your last day. I think you should live your life as though it will go on for ever; that every day is so good that you don't want it to end. -- Peter Thiel
I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important. -- Peter Thiel
You want to be the last company in a category. Those are the ones that are really valuable. -- Peter Thiel
It is sort of a bit of a caricature of capitalism, that it's always this zero-sum game where you have winners and losers. Silicon Valley, the technology industry at its best, creates a situation where everybody can be a winner. -- Peter Thiel
Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it's the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. -- Peter Thiel
Entrepreneurship: you put one dumb foot in front of the other while the world throws bricks at your head. -- Peter Thiel
Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world. -- Peter Thiel
Whoever is first to dominate the most important segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole market. -- Peter Thiel
Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it "well-roundedness," a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. -- Peter Thiel
A conventional truth can be important - it's essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example - but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret. -- Peter Thiel
What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy. -- Peter Thiel
We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. -- Peter Thiel
A company does better the less it pays the CEO. -- Peter Thiel
You don't want to just do 'me too' companies that are copying what others are doing. -- Peter Thiel
the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. -- Peter Thiel
The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them. -- Peter Thiel
EVERY MOMENT IN business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. -- Peter Thiel
Credentials are critical if you want to do something professional. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or professor, there is a credentialing process. But there are a lot of other things where it's not clear they're that important. -- Peter Thiel
Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people. -- Peter Thiel
Education needs to be rethought. Education does not just happen in college, but it also happens in developing skills which will enable people to contribute to our society as a whole. -- Peter Thiel
But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won't help you find the global maximum. -- Peter Thiel
Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century physicists: they see individuals and businesses as interchangeable atoms, not as unique creators. -- Peter Thiel
There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley. -- Peter Thiel
I think that markets classically fail in cases where there are public goods that provide benefits that people cannot capture. The big debate is how big these public goods are, where they exist, things of that sort. -- Peter Thiel
pessimism works because it's self-fulfilling: if you're a slacker with low expectations, they'll probably be met. -- Peter Thiel
The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past. -- Peter Thiel
Every living thing is just a random iteration on some other organism, and the best iterations win. -- Peter Thiel
We protect monopolies with copyright. -- Peter Thiel
Americans mythologized competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. -- Peter Thiel
I do think Bitcoin is the first [encrypted money] that has the potential to do something like change the world. -- Peter Thiel
Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone. -- Peter Thiel
Social entrepreneurs aim to combine the best of both worlds and "do well by doing good." Usually they end up doing neither. -- Peter Thiel
As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don't disrupt: Avoid competition as much as possible. -- Peter Thiel
My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing. -- Peter Thiel
In Silicon Valley, I point out that many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger's where it's like you're missing the imitation, socialization gene. -- Peter Thiel
I had a good experience in college, but I don't think interdisciplinary education is something that's stressed very much at all. It's generally considered to be something of a bad idea. -- Peter Thiel
In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, -- Peter Thiel
2. Stay lean and flexible -- Peter Thiel
Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don't like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people's couches. -- Peter Thiel
If the slogan for Google is 'Don't be evil', then the slogan for Uber is 'Do a little bit of evil & don't get caught.' -- Peter Thiel
not why it's important in general, but why you're doing something important that no one else is going to get done. That's the only thing that can make its importance unique. -- Peter Thiel
When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me - from high school to college to law school to professional life. -- Peter Thiel
The lowest-hanging fruit in preventative medicine is just to really focus on nutrition. -- Peter Thiel
Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon. -- Peter Thiel
U.S. companies are letting cash pile up on their balance sheets without investing in new projects because they don't have any concrete plans for the future. -- Peter Thiel
Unsolved problems are where you'll find opportunity. Energy is one sector with extremely urgent unsolved problems. -- Peter Thiel
'Perfect competition' is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So-called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand. -- Peter Thiel
Don't bother starting the 10,000th restaurant in Manhattan. Find something to do that if you don't do it, it won't get done. -- Peter Thiel
I would consider myself a rather staunch libertarian. -- Peter Thiel
The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve. -- Peter Thiel
Technologies like PayPal foster competition because they enable people to shift their funds from one jurisdiction to another, and I think that ultimately will lead to a world in which there's less government power and therefore more individual control. -- Peter Thiel
Competition is overrated. In practice it is quite destructive and should be avoided wherever possible. Much better than fighting for scraps in existing markets is to create and own new ones. -- Peter Thiel
The most successful companies make the core progression - to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets - a part of their founding narrative. -- Peter Thiel
what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world-changing companies yet to be started. -- Peter Thiel
Watson, Deep Blue, and ever-better machine learning algorithms are cool. But the most valuable companies in the future won't ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they'll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems? -- Peter Thiel
There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out. -- Peter Thiel
Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit. -- Peter Thiel
College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world. -- Peter Thiel
The convergence of desire is even more obvious at the top: all oligarchs have the same taste in Cristal, from Petersburg to Pyongyang. -- Peter Thiel
By spring of '98, each company's stock had more than quadrupled. Skeptics questioned earnings and revenue multiples higher than those for any non-internet company. It was easy to conclude that the market had gone crazy. -- Peter Thiel
I spend an awful lot of time just thinking about what is going on in the world and talking to people about that. It's probably one of my default social activities, just getting dinners with friends. -- Peter Thiel
I don't think success is complicated; if you do something that works, then it's a success. -- Peter Thiel
I'm in favor of free trade, but I think if you had to make a choice between having technological progress versus free trade, you had one or the other, you should always pick technological progress. I think it's an incredibly important variable for creating more prosperity. -- Peter Thiel
I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it's something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn't compute with our existing educational system. -- Peter Thiel
Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade. -- Peter Thiel
It's good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work. -- Peter Thiel
If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? -- Peter Thiel
but how to establish a process by which a sales team of modest size can move the product to a wide audience. -- Peter Thiel
When you are starting a new business you don't want to go after giant markets. You want to go after small markets and take over those markets quickly. -- Peter Thiel
The era of cornucopian hope was relabeled as an era of crazed greed and declared to be definitely over. -- Peter Thiel
American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things; lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future. -- Peter Thiel
As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation. -- Peter Thiel
But the most important lesson to learn from Jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics. The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively. Forget -- Peter Thiel
good at doing, but before that you -- Peter Thiel
Anyone who prefers owning part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company's value in the future. -- Peter Thiel
The idea of becoming an entrepreneur is something that is not taught very well in school and is something that people should try to do earlier on. -- Peter Thiel
Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding. -- Peter Thiel
All of us have to work toward a definite future ... that can motivate and inspire people to change the world. -- Peter Thiel
I think somehow people should be encouraged to think about a very long time horizon and I think this is true for businesses, it's true for governments and it's true for people doing things in the non-profit sector. -- Peter Thiel
Customers won't care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can't monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you'll be stuck with vicious competition. -- Peter Thiel
The airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone. Economists use two simplified models to explain the difference: perfect competition and monopoly. -- Peter Thiel
Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius. -- Peter Thiel
To build the next generation of companies, we must abandon the dogmas created after the crash. -- Peter Thiel
Every startup is small at the start. Every monopoly dominates a large share of its market. Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. -- Peter Thiel
Value investors look at cash flows. If a company can maintain present cash flows for 5 or 6 years, it's a good investment. Investors then just hope that those cash flows - and thus the company's value - don't decrease faster than they anticipate. -- Peter Thiel
The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed. -- Peter Thiel
I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations. -- Peter Thiel
The core problem in our society is political correctness. -- Peter Thiel
Google's motto - "Don't be evil" - is in part a branding ploy, but it's also characteristic of a kind of business that's successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. -- Peter Thiel
In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can't. -- Peter Thiel
monopolists downplay their monopoly status to avoid scrutiny, while competitive firms strategically exaggerate their uniqueness. -- Peter Thiel
Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead. -- Peter Thiel
Like acting, sales works best when hidden. -- Peter Thiel
if you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business. -- Peter Thiel
only by believing in and looking for secrets could you see beyond the convention to an opportunity hidden in plain sight. -- Peter Thiel
To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices. -- Peter Thiel
Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future. -- Peter Thiel
Spiraling demand for resources of which our world contains a finite supply is the great long-term threat posed by globalisation. That is why we need new technology to relieve it. -- Peter Thiel
People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it's growing fast. -- Peter Thiel
If you take one typewriter and build 100, you've made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress. -- Peter Thiel
Think about how Google talks about its business. It certainly doesn't claim to be a monopoly. -- Peter Thiel
small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. -- Peter Thiel
Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there's so much we can be doing with oceans, and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned. -- Peter Thiel
There are quite a lot of people who think my aspirations are not possible. That's a good thing. We don't need to really worry about these people very much, because since they don't think it's possible they won't take us very seriously- and they will not actually try to stop us until it's too late. -- Peter Thiel
Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth. -- Peter Thiel
I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries. -- Peter Thiel
Apple has a complex suite of proprietary technologies, both in hardware (like superior touchscreen materials) and software (like touchscreen interfaces purpose-designed for specific materials). -- Peter Thiel
As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage. -- Peter Thiel
The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined. -- Peter Thiel
From my perspective, I think the question of how we build a better future is an extremely important overarching question, and I think it's become obscured from us because we no longer think it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about the future. -- Peter Thiel
four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: -- Peter Thiel
Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field. -- Peter Thiel
As an undergraduate at Stanford, I started 'The Stanford Review,' which ended up being very engaged in the hot debates of the time: campus speech codes, questions about diversity on campus, all sorts of debates like that. -- Peter Thiel
There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them. -- Peter Thiel
In the developed world, technological progress means that you can have a situation where there's growth, where there's a way in which everybody can be better off over time. -- Peter Thiel
Big part of the challenge to innovation is that people too easily resign themselves to dying. -- Peter Thiel
My hope is that we're going to end up with a far more tolerant society, where the erosion of privacy, to the extent it erodes, will be offset by increased tolerance. -- Peter Thiel
Everybody has a product to sell - no -- Peter Thiel
As an investor-entrepreneur, I've always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking. -- Peter Thiel
Whatever the career, sales ability distinguishes superstars from also-rans. -- Peter Thiel
a great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future. -- Peter Thiel
Everybody has a product to sell - no matter whether you're an employee, a founder, or an investor. It's true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don't see any salespeople, you're the salesperson. -- Peter Thiel
Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation. -- Peter Thiel
Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands, of miracles. -- Peter Thiel
A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside. -- Peter Thiel
Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create. -- Peter Thiel
At no point does anyone in the chain know what to do with money in the real economy. But in an indefinite world, people actually prefer unlimited optionality; money is more valuable than anything you could possibly do with it. Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, no the end itself- -- Peter Thiel
Network effects can be powerful, but you'll never reap them unless your product is valuable to its very first users when the network is necessarily small. -- Peter Thiel
The business model piece is we're always talking about competing more effectively. If you're starting a company or career you don't want to compete. You want to create a monopoly. We want to invest in a company that has a good plan to create a monopoly. -- Peter Thiel
There's a wide range of sales ability: there are many gradations between novices, experts, and masters. There are even sales grandmasters. If you don't know any grandmasters, it's not because you haven't encountered them, but rather because their art is hidden in plain sight. -- Peter Thiel
A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket. -- Peter Thiel
If you're less sensitive to social cues, you're less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you. -- Peter Thiel
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron. -- Peter Thiel
Most people are average. Founders are not. Founders' traits seem to have an inverse normal distribution to them. -- Peter Thiel
I think competition can make people stronger at whatever it is they're competing on. If we're competing in some athletic event for competitive swimmers, really intensely competing, it's likely that both of us will become better, but it's also quite possible we'll lose sight of what's truly valuable. -- Peter Thiel
If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn't create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake. -- Peter Thiel
Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death, and danger dare, Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honor's at the stake. -- Peter Thiel
University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it's not a consumption decision, it's an investment decision. Actually, no, it's a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties. -- Peter Thiel
All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition. -- Peter Thiel
Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like technology. -- Peter Thiel
If you have invented sth new but you have not invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business - no matter how good the product -- Peter Thiel
I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit. -- Peter Thiel
I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic. -- Peter Thiel
Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange. -- Peter Thiel
Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that's true, you should fight and win. -- Peter Thiel
This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch. -- Peter Thiel
Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. -- Peter Thiel
By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready--for nothing in particular. -- Peter Thiel
There's no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley. -- Peter Thiel
College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt. -- Peter Thiel
A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus. -- Peter Thiel
As we said, even the best venture investors have a portfolio, but investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible. -- Peter Thiel
First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. -- Peter Thiel
The developing world can just do things that are extensive or horizontal, that basically copy. The developed world needs to do things that are intensive or vertical, where we take our civilization to the next level. -- Peter Thiel
The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that's hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator. -- Peter Thiel
No sector will ever be so important that merely participating in it will be enough to build a great company. -- Peter Thiel
If the whole U.S. was like Silicon Valley, we'd be in good shape. But now, the entire U.S. is not driven by technology, is not driven by innovation. -- Peter Thiel
The two houses are alike, yet they hate each other. They grow even more similar as the feud escalates. Eventually, they lose sight of why they started fighting in the first place. -- Peter Thiel
You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible. -- Peter Thiel
Ideally, I want us to be working on things where if we're not working on them, they won't happen; companies where if we don't fund them they will not receive funding. -- Peter Thiel
There are many more secrets in the world that are waiting to be found. The question of how many secrets exist in our world is roughly equivalent to how many startups people should start. -- Peter Thiel
For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don't matter. -- Peter Thiel
invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit - got -- Peter Thiel
If you're trying to develop a new drug, that costs you a billion dollars to get through the FDA. If you want to start a software company, you can get started with maybe $100,000. -- Peter Thiel
If they don't go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers. -- Peter Thiel
A diploma is a dunce hat in disguise. -- Peter Thiel
In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today. -- Peter Thiel
Great investments may look crazy but really may not be. -- Peter Thiel
We need more pessimism that the future might be a lot worse, and we need more optimism that the future might be better. -- Peter Thiel
A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly. -- Peter Thiel
Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits. -- Peter Thiel
Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. -- Peter Thiel
You will never build a company on the scale of a Facebook or a Google if you sell it along the way. -- Peter Thiel
If you have a business idea that's extremely easy to copy, that can often become something of a challenge or problem. -- Peter Thiel
There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry's having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising. -- Peter Thiel
If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people. -- Peter Thiel
to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you'll give up on trying to master it. -- Peter Thiel
I think it's a problem that we don't have more companies like Facebook. It shouldn't be the only company that's doing this well. -- Peter Thiel
competition and capitalism are opposites. -- Peter Thiel
This would be depressing but for one crucial fact: humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology. -- Peter Thiel
True heroes take their personal honor so seriously that they will fight for things that do not matter. -- Peter Thiel
The internet had yet to take off, partly because its commercial use was restricted until late 1992 and partly due to the lack of user-friendly web browsers. -- Peter Thiel
The first question we would ask if aliens landed on this planet is not, 'What does this mean for the economy or jobs?' It would be, 'Are they friendly or unfriendly?' -- Peter Thiel
I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute. -- Peter Thiel
We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today. -- Peter Thiel
anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don't matter. This -- Peter Thiel
Secrets are hard but solvable problems and we should talk about them. It's hard to work toward a radically better future if you don't believe in secrets. -- Peter Thiel
I did not want to write just another business book. -- Peter Thiel
People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat. -- Peter Thiel
The model of the U.S. economy is that we are the country that does new things. -- Peter Thiel
network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. -- Peter Thiel
Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it's rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. -- Peter Thiel
Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best. -- Peter Thiel
Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American. -- Peter Thiel
In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem. -- Peter Thiel
If that doesn't seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word "google" is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary - as a verb. -- Peter Thiel
Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past. -- Peter Thiel
When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing. -- Peter Thiel
Eroom's law - that's Moore's law backward - observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950. Since -- Peter Thiel
If you think something hard is impossible, you'll never even start trying to achieve it. -- Peter Thiel
it enjoys strong network effects from its content ecosystem: thousands of developers write software for Apple devices because that's where hundreds of millions of users are, and those users stay on the platform because it's where the apps are. -- Peter Thiel
Twitter is hard to evaluate. They have a lot of potential. It's a horribly mismanaged company - probably a lot of pot-smoking going on there. But it's such a solid franchise it may even work with all that, -- Peter Thiel
It's a horribly mismanaged company-probably a lot of pot smoking going on there. -- Peter Thiel
The millennial generation in the US is the first that has reduced expectations from those of their parents. And I think there is something decadent and declinist about that. -- Peter Thiel
The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself. -- Peter Thiel
If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future. -- Peter Thiel
Society is secretly driven by sales -- Peter Thiel
When parents have invested enormous amounts of money in their kids' education, to find their kids coming back to live with them - well, that was not what they bargained for. -- Peter Thiel
Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. -- Peter Thiel
I'm skeptical of a lot of what falls under the rubric of education ... People are on these tracks. They are getting these credentials and it's very unclear how viable they are in many cases. -- Peter Thiel
If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done. -- Peter Thiel
There's always a sense that people will do things quite differently if they think they have privacy. -- Peter Thiel
Your company needs to sell more than its product. You must also sell your company to employees and investors. -- Peter Thiel
You become a great writer by writing. -- Peter Thiel
It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they've made their peace with death. -- Peter Thiel
People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI. -- Peter Thiel
So when thinking about what kind of company to build, there are two distinct questions to ask: What secrets is nature not telling you? What secrets are people not telling you? -- Peter Thiel
I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society. -- Peter Thiel
You probably can't be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team. -- Peter Thiel
So you might ask: are there any fields that matter but haven't been standardized and institutionalized? -- Peter Thiel
Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced, and there must be an intense belief in it. -- Peter Thiel
disruption has recently transmogrified into a self-congratulatory buzzword for anything posing as trendy and new. -- Peter Thiel
most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete. -- Peter Thiel
The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it. -- Peter Thiel
The most obvious clue was sartorial: cleantech executives were running around wearing suits and ties. This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. -- Peter Thiel
The big challenge with Internet financial services has been that it's very difficult to get large numbers of customers to sign up for your service. -- Peter Thiel
Moving first is a tactic, not a goal. -- Peter Thiel
Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit. -- Peter Thiel
There are only two kinds of businesses in this world: Businesses in crazy competition, and businesses that are one of a kind. -- Peter Thiel
When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the Internet. The Apollo program was just about to put a man on the moon - and it was Neil Armstrong, from right here in Ohio. The future felt limitless. But today, our government is broken. -- Peter Thiel
I think it's always good for gay people to come out, but it's also understandable why people might choose not to do so. -- Peter Thiel
Creative monopolies aren't just good for the rest of society; they're powerful engines for making it better. -- Peter Thiel
Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don't see. -- Peter Thiel
I think what's always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth. -- Peter Thiel
If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth. -- Peter Thiel
Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up. -- Peter Thiel
People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why. -- Peter Thiel
As computers become more and more powerful, they won't be substitutes for humans: they'll be complements. -- Peter Thiel
If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world-changing companies yet to be started. This -- Peter Thiel
Luck is like an atheistic word for God ... -- Peter Thiel
when I arrived at Stanford in 1985, economics, not computer science, was the most popular major. To most people on campus, the tech sector seemed idiosyncratic or even provincial. -- Peter Thiel
Every time you write an email, it is in the public domain. There are all these ways where security is not as good as people believe. -- Peter Thiel
I'm not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America. -- Peter Thiel
many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn't. -- Peter Thiel
Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried. -- Peter Thiel
Bob Dylan has said that he who is not busy being born is busy dying. -- Peter Thiel
All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past. -- Peter Thiel
How to teach people to do what hasn't been done is a great riddle. -- Peter Thiel
I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones. -- Peter Thiel
Or you can radically improve an existing solution: once you're 10x better, you escape competition. -- Peter Thiel
If you do something new, it will always look a little bit strange. -- Peter Thiel
Why work with a group of people who don't even like each other? -- Peter Thiel
No company has a culture, every company is a culture -- Peter Thiel
succeed, "you must study the endgame before everything else. -- Peter Thiel
Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced. -- Peter Thiel
Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous. -- Peter Thiel
What important truth do very few people agree with you on? -- Peter Thiel
Google makes so much money that it's now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined. -- Peter Thiel
We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius. -- Peter Thiel
I worked at a law firm in New York very briefly. -- Peter Thiel
I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer. -- Peter Thiel
...a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. -- Peter Thiel
I suspect if people live a lot longer they would be retired for a somewhat longer period of time. Just the financial planning takes on a very different character. -- Peter Thiel
Airbnb is undervalued. -- Peter Thiel
I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years - part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion. -- Peter Thiel
What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas? -- Peter Thiel
Great tech opportunities happen only once. -- Peter Thiel
If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is. -- Peter Thiel
the best way to create productivity is "to get rid of people. -- Peter Thiel
The future is limitless. -- Peter Thiel
In the short term I want to change the world, In the long term I want to live forever. -- Peter Thiel
You can also make a 10x improvement through superior integrated design. -- Peter Thiel
Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school. -- Peter Thiel
I believe that people are too complacent about technology. -- Peter Thiel
Recruiting should never be outsourced. Everyone at your company should be different in the same way. -- Peter Thiel
Great things happen only once. -- Peter Thiel
An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role. -- Peter Thiel
we need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism. -- Peter Thiel
I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures. -- Peter Thiel
I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically. -- Peter Thiel
When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares? -- Peter Thiel
You would be dressed in fine clothes and feast royally until your brief reign ended and they cut your heart out. -- Peter Thiel
Inside a firm, people become obsessed with their competitors for career advancement. Then the firms themselves become obsessed with their competitors in the marketplace. Amid all the human drama, people lose sight of what matters and focus on their rivals instead. -- Peter Thiel
Monopoly is the condition of every successful business. -- Peter Thiel
Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away. -- Peter Thiel
Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people. -- Peter Thiel
I think in my twenties I tended to think of all people as sort of more or less alike. In now think that people are really different in all these subtle ways that are very important. -- Peter Thiel
Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.' -- Peter Thiel
The road doesn't have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths. -- Peter Thiel
Every time we create something new we go from zero to one. -- Peter Thiel
The value of failure is greatly over-rated. It's a preposterous myth. -- Peter Thiel
One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar. -- Peter Thiel
we don't live in a normal world; we live under a power law. -- Peter Thiel
cash-poor executive, by contrast, will focus on increasing the value of the company as a whole. -- Peter Thiel
A lot of the key to Apple's succes is Designing technology in order to hide it. -- Peter Thiel
The smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old: -- Peter Thiel
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. -- Peter Thiel
The something of somewhere is mostly just the nothing of nowhere. -- Peter Thiel