Peter Thiel Quotes & Sayings

When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing. — Peter Thiel

Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.' — Peter Thiel

The future is limitless. — Peter Thiel

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

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

disruption has recently transmogrified into a self-congratulatory buzzword for anything posing as trendy and new. — Peter Thiel

You should focus relentlessly on something you're good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future. For the startup world, this means you should not necessarily start your own company, even if you are extraordinarily talented. If anything, too many people are starting their own companies today. 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. The power law means that differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies. You could have 100% of the equity if you fully fund your own venture, but if it fails you'll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable (more than $35 million as of this writing). — Peter Thiel

good at doing, but before that you — Peter Thiel

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

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

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

What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy. — Peter Thiel

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

I 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 Thiel

Whatever the career, sales ability distinguishes superstars from also-rans. — Peter Thiel

Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best. — Peter Thiel

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

People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat. — Peter Thiel

what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world-changing companies yet to be started. — Peter Thiel

I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it's something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn't compute with our existing educational system. — Peter Thiel

The internet had yet to take off, partly because its commercial use was restricted until late 1992 and partly due to the lack of user-friendly web browsers. — Peter Thiel

One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar. — Peter Thiel

This implies two very strange rules for VCs. First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. This is a scary rule, because it eliminates the vast majority of possible investments. (Even quite successful companies usually succeed on a more humble scale.) This leads to rule number two: because rule number one is so restrictive, there can't be any other rules. — Peter Thiel

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius. — Peter Thiel

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

Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves? — Peter Thiel

In 2001, my co-workers at PayPal and I would often get lunch on Castro Street in Mountain View. We had our pick of restaurants, starting with obvious categories like Indian, sushi, and burgers. There were more options once we settled on a type: North Indian or South Indian, cheaper or fancier, and so on. In contrast to the competitive local restaurant market, PayPal was at that time the only email-based payments company in the world. We employed fewer people than the restaurants on Castro Street did, but our business was much more valuable than all of those restaurants combined. Starting a new South Indian restaurant is a really hard way to make money. If you lose sight of competitive reality and focus on trivial differentiating factors - maybe you think your naan is superior because of your great-grandmother's recipe - your business is unlikely to survive. — Peter Thiel

Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students - Mark Zuckerberg's first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don't even appear to be business opportunities at — Peter Thiel

If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future. — Peter Thiel

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

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

Everybody has a product to sell - no matter whether you're an employee, a founder, or an investor. It's true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don't see any salespeople, you're the salesperson. — Peter Thiel

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

If you do something new, it will always look a little bit strange. — Peter Thiel

What important truth do very few people agree with you on? — Peter Thiel

For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don't matter. — Peter Thiel

You want to be the last company in a category. Those are the ones that are really valuable. — Peter Thiel

Twitter is hard to evaluate. They have a lot of potential. It's a horribly mismanaged company - probably a lot of pot-smoking going on there. But it's such a solid franchise it may even work with all that, — Peter Thiel

Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it "well-roundedness," a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. — Peter Thiel

Every time we create something new we go from zero to one. — Peter Thiel

Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that's true, you should fight and win. — Peter Thiel

It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they've made their peace with death. — Peter Thiel

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

This would be depressing but for one crucial fact: humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology. — Peter Thiel

I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit. — Peter Thiel

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

If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is. — Peter Thiel

A board of three is ideal. Your board should never exceed five people, unless your company is publicly held. (Government regulations effectively mandate that public companies have larger boards - the average is nine members.) By far the worst you can do is to make your board extra large. When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: "Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run." Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization. If you want that kind of free rein from your board, blow it up to giant size. If you want an effective board, keep it small. — Peter Thiel

Americans mythologized competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. — Peter Thiel

If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people. — Peter Thiel

Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced, and there must be an intense belief in it. — Peter Thiel

MONOPOLY. Tesla started with a tiny submarket that it could dominate: the market for high-end electric sports cars. Since the first Roadster rolled off the production line in 2008, Tesla's sold only about 3,000 of them, but at $109,000 apiece that's not trivial. Starting small allowed Tesla to undertake the necessary R&D to build the slightly less expensive Model S, and now Tesla owns the luxury electric sedan market, too. They sold more than 20,000 sedans in 2013 and now Tesla is in prime position to expand to broader markets in the future. — Peter Thiel

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

Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced. — Peter Thiel

in order to be happy, every individual needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort.

Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world's hard problems have already been solved. What's left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can't do, even Einstein couldn't have done. — Peter Thiel

Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit. — Peter Thiel

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

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

The model of the U.S. economy is that we are the country that does new things. — Peter Thiel

To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices. — Peter Thiel

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

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

Every living thing is just a random iteration on some other organism, and the best iterations win. — Peter Thiel

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

Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit. — Peter Thiel

. . . the bond bubble, the tech bubble, the stock bubble, the emerging markets bubble, the housing bubble. . . One by one they had all burst, and their bursting showed that they had been temporary solutions to long-term problems, maybe evasions of those problems, distractions. With so many bubbles-so many people chasing ephemera, all at the same time-it was clear that things were fundamentally not working. — Peter Thiel

when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. — Peter Thiel

I worked at a law firm in New York very briefly. — Peter Thiel

The era of cornucopian hope was relabeled as an era of crazed greed and declared to be definitely over. — Peter Thiel

The airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone. Economists use two simplified models to explain the difference: perfect competition and monopoly. — Peter Thiel

four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: — Peter Thiel

The idea of becoming an entrepreneur is something that is not taught very well in school and is something that people should try to do earlier on. — Peter Thiel

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. — Peter Thiel

Most people are average. Founders are not. Founders' traits seem to have an inverse normal distribution to them. — Peter Thiel

The lowest-hanging fruit in preventative medicine is just to really focus on nutrition. — Peter Thiel

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

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

If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world-changing companies yet to be started. This — Peter Thiel

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

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. — Peter Thiel

Credentials are critical if you want to do something professional. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or professor, there is a credentialing process. But there are a lot of other things where it's not clear they're that important. — Peter Thiel

In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable. — Peter Thiel

the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. — Peter Thiel

Monopoly is the condition of every successful business. — Peter Thiel

All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past. — Peter Thiel

First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. — Peter Thiel

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

I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society. — Peter Thiel

The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it's always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it's hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you'll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero. — Peter Thiel

Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human. — Peter Thiel

1. The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 6. The Durability Question Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? 7. The Secret Question Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don't see? — Peter Thiel

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

A diploma is a dunce hat in disguise. — Peter Thiel

The convergence of desire is even more obvious at the top: all oligarchs have the same taste in Cristal, from Petersburg to Pyongyang. — Peter Thiel

I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important. — Peter Thiel

But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. — Peter Thiel

Airbnb is undervalued. — Peter Thiel

cash-poor executive, by contrast, will focus on increasing the value of the company as a whole. — Peter Thiel

only by believing in and looking for secrets could you see beyond the convention to an opportunity hidden in plain sight. — Peter Thiel

in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don't perceive it to be unjust. — Peter Thiel