Peter Thiel Quotes

Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.

Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.

Distribution may not matter in fictional worlds, but it matters in most. 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 this happen, and it's harder than it looks.

Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.

I do think Bitcoin is the first [encrypted money] that has the potential to do something like change the world.

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.

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.

If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future.

The value of failure is greatly over-rated. It's a preposterous myth.

Big part of the challenge to innovation is that people too easily resign themselves to dying.

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.

A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed.

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.

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.

Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.

Every university…seem[s] to reassure you that ‘it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.’ That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly at something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

I'm always very excited about trying to do something on next-generation biotechnology and life sciences because I think if we can cure cancer or dementia, we can really make the future a lot better and I think these things are eminently doable.

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.

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.

We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.

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.

In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’ . . . We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. . . . The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

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.

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.

The something of somewhere is mostly just the nothing of nowhere.

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.

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

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?

I think we have a bubble in the US in government bonds, because of the quantitative easing and the negative real interest rates, and to some extent, that increases asset values across the board, including in startups.

Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

For a new payment product, you always have to ask, how much better is it than the current solution? So when we started Paypal, for eBay micro merchants, it was much better than getting the 7 to 10 days process of cashing a check in the mail. When you look at stores or physical worlds, places, a lot of these places are already set up to take cash or credit card. Apple Pay may be an incremental improvement, maybe a little bit better. But when you have something that's pretty good and you go to something that's perfect, sometimes it's very hard to drive adoption because the delta is not that big.

Most people are average. Founders are not. Founders' traits seem to have an inverse normal distribution to them.

Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's a horribly mismanaged company-probably a lot of pot smoking going on there.

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.

Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.

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.

Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

No company has a culture; every company is a culture.

I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures.

The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present.