Peter Thiel Quotes

#1. Social entrepreneurs aim to combine the best of both worlds and "do well by doing good." Usually they end up doing neither.

Peter Thiel

#2. 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

#3. Every living thing is just a random iteration on some other organism, and the best iterations win.

Peter Thiel

#4. If you have a business idea that's extremely easy to copy, that can often become something of a challenge or problem.

Peter Thiel

#5. 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

#6. Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.

Peter Thiel

#7. I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.

Peter Thiel

#8. The core problem in our society is political correctness.

Peter Thiel

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Peter Thiel

#14. 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

#15. Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.

Peter Thiel

#16. cash-poor executive, by contrast, will focus on increasing the value of the company as a whole.

Peter Thiel

#17. Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them.

Peter Thiel

#18. I'm not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.

Peter Thiel

#19. Why work with a group of people who don't even like each other?

Peter Thiel

#20. 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

#21. You would be dressed in fine clothes and feast royally until your brief reign ended and they cut your heart out.

Peter Thiel

#22. Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.

Peter Thiel

#23. 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

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

Peter Thiel

#25. invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit - got

Peter Thiel

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. We protect monopolies with copyright.

Peter Thiel

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones.

Peter Thiel

#32. An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role.

Peter Thiel

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. Google makes so much money that it's now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

#37. 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

#38. Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.

Peter Thiel

#39. Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.

Peter Thiel

#40. 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

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

Peter Thiel

#42. There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley.

Peter Thiel

#43. You become a great writer by writing.

Peter Thiel

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. The lowest-hanging fruit in preventative medicine is just to really focus on nutrition.

Peter Thiel

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. if you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business.

Peter Thiel

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. Great tech opportunities happen only once.

Peter Thiel

#59. 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

#60. 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

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

Peter Thiel

#62. ...a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry.

Peter Thiel

#63. 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

#64. Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.

Peter Thiel

#65. Society is secretly driven by sales

Peter Thiel

#66. 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

#67. four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today:

Peter Thiel

#68. The era of cornucopian hope was relabeled as an era of crazed greed and declared to be definitely over.

Peter Thiel

#69. What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.

Peter Thiel

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

#74. Bob Dylan has said that he who is not busy being born is busy dying.

Peter Thiel

#75. You will never build a company on the scale of a Facebook or a Google if you sell it along the way.

Peter Thiel

#76. 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

#77. As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don't disrupt: Avoid competition as much as possible.

Peter Thiel

#78. Technology just means information technology.

Peter Thiel

#79. a great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future.

Peter Thiel

#80. Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands, of miracles.

Peter Thiel

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. Moving first is a tactic, not a goal.

Peter Thiel

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. Americans mythologized competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines.

Peter Thiel

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. I worked at a law firm in New York very briefly.

Peter Thiel

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. No company has a culture, every company is a culture

Peter Thiel

#99. 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

#100. 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