Peter Thiel Quotes

#1. It's harder now for journalists to do stories about billionaires, like Peter Thiel, without having at the back of their minds the fear that maybe somebody deep-pocketed, you know, with limited resources is going to come after us and can my organization afford to defend me?

Nick Denton

#2. Despite Marc Andreessen's and Peter Thiel's belief that the outsize gains of tech billionaires are the result of a genius entrepreneur culture, inequality at this scale is a choice - the result of the laws and taxes that we as a society choose to establish.

Jonathan Taplin

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 2. Stay lean and flexible

Peter Thiel

#7. I would not describe myself as a super early adopter of consumer technology.

Peter Thiel

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

#12. 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

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

Peter Thiel

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

Peter Thiel

#23. 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

#24. A start up messed up at the foundation cannot be fixed.

Peter Thiel

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. disruption has recently transmogrified into a self-congratulatory buzzword for anything posing as trendy and new.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

#29. 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

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

Peter Thiel

#31. 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

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

Peter Thiel

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'

Peter Thiel

#39. 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

#40. You want to be the last company in a category. Those are the ones that are really valuable.

Peter Thiel

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. So you might ask: are there any fields that matter but haven't been standardized and institutionalized?

Peter Thiel

#47. 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

#48. Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation.

Peter Thiel

#49. Airbnb is undervalued.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.

Peter Thiel

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. Thiel's law": a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.

Peter Thiel

#57. Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don't see.

Peter Thiel

#58. Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.

Peter Thiel

#59. 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

#60. 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

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

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

#63. small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

Peter Thiel

#69. The road doesn't have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.

Peter Thiel

#75. 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

#76. 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

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

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

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

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

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

Peter Thiel

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. Whatever the career, sales ability distinguishes superstars from also-rans.

Peter Thiel

#93. We protect monopolies with copyright.

Peter Thiel

#94. Everybody has a product to sell - no

Peter Thiel

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. If you think something hard is impossible, you'll never even start trying to achieve it.

Peter Thiel

#99. The future is limitless.

Peter Thiel

#100. 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