Peter Thiel

“If you treat the future something definite, it makes to understand it in advance and to work to shape it .”

— Peter Thiel

“people overestimate the relative difficulty of science and engineering, because the challenges of those fields are obvious”

— Peter Thiel

“As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a…

— Peter Thiel

“Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad)”

— Peter Thiel

“Anybody who would be more powerfully swayed by free laundry pickup or pet day care would be a bad addition to your…

— Peter Thiel

“Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.”

— Peter Thiel

“Time and decision-making themselves follow a power law, and some moments matter far more than others”

— Peter Thiel

“Many of us at PayPal logged 100-hour workweeks. No doubt that was counterproductive,”

— 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…

— Peter Thiel

“Competition means no profit for everybody , no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival so why do people believe that competition…

— 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…

— Peter Thiel

I think we have a bubble in the US in government bonds, because of the quantitative easing and the negative real interest…

— Peter Thiel

“Today our challenge is to both imagine and create the new technologies that can make the 21st century more peaceful and prosperous…

— Peter Thiel

“In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work…

— Peter Thiel

“CREATIVE MONOPOLY means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful…

— Peter Thiel

The business model piece is we're always talking about competing more effectively. If you're starting a company or career you don't want…

— Peter Thiel

There are quite a lot of people who think my aspirations are not possible. That's a good thing. We don't need to…

— Peter Thiel

“Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is…

— Peter Thiel

“Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you…

— Peter Thiel

People working on bigger ideas on a more protracted timeline will be more on the stealth side. They aren't releasing new PR…

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

“the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places,”

— Peter Thiel

“Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes…

— Peter Thiel

“Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised…

— Peter Thiel

In the U.S., we fundamentally need to do new things, which I think is harder for the government to do. And moreover,…

— Peter Thiel

“In a world of gigantic administrative bureaucracies both public and private, searching for a new path might seem like hoping for a…

— Peter Thiel

For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter; true…

— Peter Thiel

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously…

— Peter Thiel

Competition is overrated. In practice it is quite destructive and should be avoided wherever possible. Much better than fighting for scraps in…

— Peter Thiel

In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was…

— Peter Thiel

By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely…

— Peter Thiel

“This implies two very strange rules for VCs. First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of…

— Peter Thiel

Secrets are hard but solvable problems and we should talk about them. It's hard to work toward a radically better future if…

— 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…

— Peter Thiel

The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level…

— Peter Thiel

There are many more secrets in the world that are waiting to be found. The question of how many secrets exist in…

— Peter Thiel

“In Silicon Valley, nerds are skeptical of advertising, marketing, and sales because they seem superficial and irrational. But advertising matters because it…

— Peter Thiel

My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization,…

— Peter Thiel

“If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely…

— 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…

— Peter Thiel