Peter Thiel Best Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

Think about how Google talks about its business. It certainly doesn't claim to be a monopoly. — Peter Thiel

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

The developing world can just do things that are extensive or horizontal, that basically copy. The developed world needs to do things that are intensive or vertical, where we take our civilization to the next level. — 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

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

Great investments may look crazy but really may not be. — Peter Thiel

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

we don't live in a normal world; we live under a power law. — Peter Thiel

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

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

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

Apple has a complex suite of proprietary technologies, both in hardware (like superior touchscreen materials) and software (like touchscreen interfaces purpose-designed for specific materials). — Peter Thiel

If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done. — Peter Thiel

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

Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried. — Peter Thiel

Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it's the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. — 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

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

the best way to create productivity is "to get rid of people. — Peter Thiel

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

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

The 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 Thiel

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

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

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

The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve. — Peter Thiel

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

The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that's hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator. — Peter Thiel

The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed. — Peter Thiel

Like acting, sales works best when hidden. — Peter Thiel

Anyone who prefers owning a part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company's value in the future. Equity can't create perfect incentives, but it's the best way for a founder to keep everyone in the company broadly aligned. — Peter Thiel

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

people then products then traffic then revenue." The people are supposed to come for the coolness: Yahoo! demonstrated design awareness by overhauling its logo, it asserted youthful relevance by acquiring hot startups like Tumblr, and it has gained media attention for Mayer's own star power. But the big question is what products Yahoo! will actually create. — Peter Thiel

Recruiting should never be outsourced. Everyone at your company should be different in the same way. — Peter Thiel

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

The value of failure is greatly over-rated. It's a preposterous myth. — 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

Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it's rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. — 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

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

competition and capitalism are opposites. — Peter Thiel

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

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

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

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

Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands, of miracles. — Peter Thiel

many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn't. — Peter Thiel

We protect monopolies with copyright. — Peter Thiel

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

The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past. — Peter Thiel

A company does better the less it pays the CEO. — Peter Thiel

No sector will ever be so important that merely participating in it will be enough to build a great company. — Peter Thiel

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

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

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

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