Peter Thiel
Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation.Collection: Church
Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous.Collection: Substance
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.Collection: Leadership
Secrets are hard but solvable problems and we should talk about them. It's hard to work toward a radically better future if you don't believe in secrets.Collection: Believe
Most people are average. Founders are not. Founders' traits seem to have an inverse normal distribution to them.Collection: Average
If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.Collection: Thinking
A lot of the key to Apple's succes is Designing technology in order to hide it.Collection: Technology
A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed.Collection: Bubbles
I do think Bitcoin is the first [encrypted money] that has the potential to do something like change the world.Collection: Thinking
Google makes so much money that it’s now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined.Collection: Google
There is perhaps no specific time that is necessarily right to start your company or start your life. But some times and some moments seem more auspicious than others. Now is such a moment. If we don’t take charge and usher in the future - if you don’t take charge of your life - there is the sense that no one else will.Collection: Moments
There's a wide range of sales ability: there are many gradations between novices, experts, and masters. There are even sales grandmasters. If you don't know any grandmasters, it's not because you haven't encountered them, but rather because their art is hidden in plain sight.Collection: Art
A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus.Collection: Believe
Moving first is a tactic, not a goal.Collection: Moving
Distribution may not matter in fictional worlds, but it matters in most. The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make this happen, and it's harder than it looks.Collection: Dream
What valuable company is nobody building?Collection: Building
People working on bigger ideas on a more protracted timeline will be more on the stealth side. They aren’t releasing new PR announcements every day. The bigger the secret and the likelier it is that you alone have it, the more time you have to execute. There may be far more people going after hard secrets than we think.Collection: Thinking
If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future.Collection: Optimistic
Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.Collection: Running
Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.Collection: People
In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’ . . . We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. . . . The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.Collection: Fate
Forget startup companies. The next frontier is startup countries.Collection: Country
Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.Collection: Should
There are quite a lot of people who think my aspirations are not possible. That's a good thing. We don't need to really worry about these people very much, because since they don't think it's possible they won't take us very seriously- and they will not actually try to stop us until it's too late.Collection: Thinking
Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.Collection: Past
By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready-for nothing in particular.Collection: College
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Cash Flow
No company has a culture; every company is a culture.Collection: Culture
First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.Collection: Firsts
If they don't go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers.Collection: Wall
Anyone who prefers owning 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.Collection: Commitment
We need more pessimism that the future might be a lot worse, and we need more optimism that the future might be better.Collection: Optimism
I think we have a bubble in the US in government bonds, because of the quantitative easing and the negative real interest rates, and to some extent, that increases asset values across the board, including in startups.Collection: Real
A company does better the less it pays the CEO.Collection: Doe
Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Thinking
I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures.Collection: Thinking
I think markets are often not thinking on a long-time horizon, I think that our government structurally is doing even less so. When we have a government where we have people who are up for election at most once every six years for a U.S. senator, that's a time horizon that is much shorter than in a market that a company is looking at 10, 15, 20 years which is a time horizon over which a stock price is typically valued.Collection: Thinking
Now it’s either about technology that doesn’t work or about technology that’s used in bad ways. The anthology of the top twenty-five sci-fi stories in 1970 was, like, ‘Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon,’ and in 2008 it was, like, ‘The galaxy is run by a fundamentalist Islamic confederacy, and there are people who are hunting planets and killing them for fun.’Collection: Running
Today’s ‘best practices’ lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.Collection: Path