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.
Peter ThielThe 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 ThielI 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 ThielValue investors look at cash flows. If a company can maintain present cash flows for 5 or 6 years, itโs a good investment. Investors then just hope that those cash flows - and thus the companyโs value - donโt decrease faster than they anticipate.
Peter ThielWhen you already have $150 billion a year in revenues from the iPhone, it's very hard to come up with any new vertical that will sort of move the dial. And there's this sort of weird effect where the larger a company gets, the harder it is to come up with any new product that really moves the dial.
Peter Thiel