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.
I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.
I think it's a problem that we don't have more companies like Facebook. It shouldn't be the only company that's doing this well.
I did not want to write just another business book.
Ideally, I want us to be working on things where if we're not working on them, they won't happen; companies where if we don't fund them they will not receive funding.
I don't think success is complicated; if you do something that works, then it's a success.
The big challenge with Internet financial services has been that it's very difficult to get large numbers of customers to sign up for your service.
There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.
Great things happen only once.
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.
If you have a business idea that's extremely easy to copy, that can often become something of a challenge or problem.
The millennial generation in the US is the first that has reduced expectations from those of their parents. And I think there is something decadent and declinist about that.
The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.Collection: Zero
Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.Collection: Best Practices
Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.Collection: Thinking
Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.Collection: Successful
The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present.Collection: Successful
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.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Unique
We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.Collection: Mean
EVERY MOMENT IN business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.Collection: Business
When you are starting a new business you don't want to go after giant markets. You want to go after small markets and take over those markets quickly.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Entrepreneur
All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.Collection: Competition
Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.Collection: Zero
Society is secretly driven by salesCollection: Driven
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?Collection: Smart
You have as much computing power in your iPhone as was available at the time of the Apollo missions. But what is it being used for? It’s being used to throw angry birds at pigs; it’s being used to send pictures of your cat to people halfway around the world; it’s being used to check in as the virtual mayor of a virtual nowhere while you’re riding a subway from the nineteenth century.Collection: Cat
The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.Collection: Effort
There are only two kinds of businesses in this world: Businesses in crazy competition, and businesses that are one of a kind.Collection: Crazy
In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).Collection: Careers
If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.Collection: Lying
Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.Collection: Long
But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.Collection: Powerful
The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.Collection: Path
Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.Collection: School
Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. No matter how strong your product-even if it easily fits into already established habits and anybody who tries it likes it immediately-you must still support it with a strong distribution plan.Collection: Strong
Every time we create something new we go from zero to one.Collection: Zero
Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.Collection: Intelligent
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?Collection: People
As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don't disrupt: Avoid competition as much as possible.Collection: Competition
The college kids should think hard about what they're doing. If you have a great idea for a company, there's no right time to start it, and it's often better to start it sooner rather than later. I went to Stanford undergrad and Stanford Law School, and if I had to do it over again, I might still do those things, but I wish I had asked the type of questions like, why I was doing it, was it just for the status and prestige, or was it because I was really interested in the substance of it.Collection: School
We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Thinking
Great tech opportunities happen only once.Collection: Opportunity
Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.Collection: Technology
All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Smoking