Peter Thiel
One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar.
Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.
The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present - and that's not fully valued.
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.
Technologies like PayPal foster competition because they enable people to shift their funds from one jurisdiction to another, and I think that ultimately will lead to a world in which there's less government power and therefore more individual control.
My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing.
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.
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.
There's always a sense that people will do things quite differently if they think they have privacy.
A conventional truth can be important - it's essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example - but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret.
Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.
Every time you write an email, it is in the public domain. There are all these ways where security is not as good as people believe.
What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?
In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.
You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.
Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable.
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.
Don't bother starting the 10,000th restaurant in Manhattan. Find something to do that if you don't do it, it won't get done.
Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.
How to teach people to do what hasn't been done is a great riddle.
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.
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.
I think what's always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth.
One of my friends started a company in 1997, seven years before Facebook, called SocialNet. And they had all these ideas, and you could be, like, a cat, and I'd be a dog on the Internet, and we'd have this virtual reality, and we would just not be ourselves. That didn't work because reality always works better than any fake version of it.
Unsolved problems are where you'll find opportunity. Energy is one sector with extremely urgent unsolved problems.
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.
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.
Airbnb is undervalued.
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.
Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits.
Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.
Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?
Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions 'When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?' A bad answer is, 'We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.'
An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role.
As an undergraduate at Stanford, I started 'The Stanford Review,' which ended up being very engaged in the hot debates of the time: campus speech codes, questions about diversity on campus, all sorts of debates like that.
When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?
If you do something new, it will always look a little bit strange.
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.
I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.
I'm not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.
I suspect if people live a lot longer they would be retired for a somewhat longer period of time. Just the financial planning takes on a very different character.
I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.
I would consider myself a rather staunch libertarian.
You become a great writer by writing.
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.
I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.
The core problem in our society is political correctness.
You don't want to just do 'me too' companies that are copying what others are doing.
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.