People working on bigger ideas on a more protracted timeline will be more on the stealth side. They arenโt releasing new PR announcements every day. The bigger the secret and the likelier it is that you alone have it, the more time you have to execute. There may be far more people going after hard secrets than we think.
Peter ThielIn the U.S., we fundamentally need to do new things, which I think is harder for the government to do. And moreover, it is not something our government actually is inclined to particularly do.
Peter ThielRivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.
Peter ThielI think China thinks information technology is less important than we think it is in the US, economically, and more important politically. And so Chinese internet companies are extremely political, they're protected behind the great firewall of China, and investment in Alibaba is good as long as Jack Ma stays in the good graces of the Chinese communist party. Alibaba is largely copying various business models from the US; they have combined some things in interesting new ways, but I think it's fundamentally a business that works because of the political protection you get in China.
Peter ThielIn our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its formsโfrom the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called โsocial democracy.โ . . . 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.
Peter Thiel