Thiel Quotes & Sayings

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

Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like technology. — Peter Thiel

Technology just means information technology. — Peter Thiel

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

It's a horribly mismanaged company-probably a lot of pot smoking going on there. — 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

But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won't help you find the global maximum. — Peter Thiel

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

All of us have to work toward a definite future ... that can motivate and inspire people to change the world. — Peter Thiel

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

As computers become more and more powerful, they won't be substitutes for humans: they'll be complements. — 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

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

Thiel rejects the small-mindedness of most of the Valley's entrepreneurialism. The motto of Founders Fund is: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." But — Richard Byrne Reilly

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

Bob Dylan has said that he who is not busy being born is busy dying. — Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, has launched a movement to convince people to not go to college.3 It's a waste of money. The return on investment isn't there anymore. School has gotten too expensive. . . If writing [computer] code is your deal and you're able to go to a trade school that enables you to write code, that's far better than a computer science degree from a four-year college or university that looks great on paper, but doesn't give you the skills you need when you graduate. — John Dearie

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

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

I don't think success is complicated; if you do something that works, then it's a success. — Peter Thiel

Nutrition matters for everybody, but you can't major in it at Harvard. Most top scientists go into other fields. Most of the big studies were done 30 or 40 years ago, and most are seriously flawed. The food pyramid that told us to eat low fat and enormous amounts of grains was probably more a product of lobbying by Big Food than real science; its chief impact has been to aggravate our obesity epidemic. There's plenty more to learn: we know more about the physics of faraway stars than we know about human nutrition. It won't be easy, but it's not obviously impossible: exactly the kind of field that could yield secrets. — Peter Thiel

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

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

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

I did not want to write just another business book. — Peter Thiel

Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century physicists: they see individuals and businesses as interchangeable atoms, not as unique creators. — Peter Thiel

Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people. — 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

Just as war cost the Montagues and Capulets their children, it cost Microsoft and Google their dominance: Apple came along and overtook them all. In January 2013, Apple's market capitalization was $500 billion, while Google and Microsoft combined were worth $467 billion. Just — 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

If you're trying to develop a new drug, that costs you a billion dollars to get through the FDA. If you want to start a software company, you can get started with maybe $100,000. — Peter Thiel

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

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

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

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

Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up. — Peter Thiel

Or you can radically improve an existing solution: once you're 10x better, you escape competition. — Peter Thiel

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth. — Peter Thiel

Great tech opportunities happen only once. — Peter Thiel

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

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

I believe that people are too complacent about technology. — Peter Thiel

All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition. — Peter Thiel

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

Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation. — Peter Thiel

Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead. — Peter Thiel

From my perspective, I think the question of how we build a better future is an extremely important overarching question, and I think it's become obscured from us because we no longer think it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about the future. — 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

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

We protect monopolies with copyright. — 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

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

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

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

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

competition and capitalism are opposites. — 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

So you might ask: are there any fields that matter but haven't been standardized and institutionalized? — Peter Thiel

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

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

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

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

For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be 22 And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect's sake those days will be shortened (Matthew 24:21-22). 36 Watch therefore, and pray always that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man. (Luke 21:36) — Bob 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

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

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

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

You don't want to just do 'me too' companies that are copying what others are doing. — Peter Thiel

Why work with a group of people who don't even like each other? — Peter Thiel

a great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future. — Peter Thiel

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

The era of cornucopian hope was relabeled as an era of crazed greed and declared to be definitely over. — 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 airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone. Economists use two simplified models to explain the difference: perfect competition and monopoly. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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