Peter H. Diamandis Quotes & Sayings

A skunk works does a totally different job. It's a group of people looking for a better hill to climb. — Peter H. Diamandis

In 1992, as we sought to establish our permanent terrestrial campus, we put out an RFP (request for proposals) that basically said, "Hi there, we're ISU. We have this concept for a permanent campus. We've held five summer programs in five different cities, and this is our vision for what we want to create and where we want to go. Please tell us how much cash endowment, buildings, and operational money you will give us to bring our vision to your city." Had we gotten no response at all, I would not have been surprised. But that wasn't the case. Within six months, we received seven proposals ranging from $20 million to $50 million in funding, buildings, faculty, equipment, and even the promise of accreditation. In short, everything we needed to implement the next phase of ISU. — Peter H. Diamandis

But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. — Peter H. Diamandis

For linear-thinking companies, the six Ds of exponentials are the six horsemen of the apocalypse - no question about it. — Peter H. Diamandis

In fact, I've come to think of making stone soup as the only way an entrepreneur can succeed. — Peter H. Diamandis

Blue Heron Biotechnology, — Peter H. Diamandis

Today Americans living below the poverty line are not just light-years ahead of most Africans; they're light-years ahead of the wealthiest Americans from just a century ago. Today 99 percent of Americans living below the poverty line have electricity, water, flushing toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 percent have a television; 88 percent have a telephone; 71 percent have a car; and 70 percent even have air-conditioning. This may not seem like much, but one hundred years ago men like Henry Ford and Cornelius Vanderbilt were among the richest on the planet, but they enjoyed few of these luxuries. — Peter H. Diamandis

Just three or four decades ago, if you wanted to access a thousand core processors, you'd need to be the chairman of MIT's computer science department or the secretary of the US Defense Department. Today the average chip in your cell phone can perform about a billion calculations per second. Yet today has nothing on tomorrow. "By 2020, a chip with today's processing power will cost about a penny," CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 "which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries - cell phone, Internet - that we all seem to take for granted. — Peter H. Diamandis

[L]ean start-ups are the small furry mammals competing with the large dinosaurs - meaning they're one asteroid strike away from world dominance. Exponential technology is that asteroid. — Peter H. Diamandis

the next time you're typing in drunken letters into your computer, know that you're actually helping digitize the world's libraries. — Peter H. Diamandis

Big goals only increase motivation," explains Latham,14 "when the person setting those goals is confident in their ability to achieve them. This means breaking big goals apart into achievable subgoals. — Peter H. Diamandis

Skype demonetized long-distance telephony; Craigslist demonetized classified advertising; Napster demonetized the music industry. This list goes on and on. More critically, because demonetization is also deceptive, almost no one within those industries was prepared for such radical change. — Peter H. Diamandis