Peter Thiel Quotes

First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.

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

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

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

University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it's not a consumption decision, it's an investment decision. Actually, no, it's a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties.

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.

If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can't you do this in 6 months?

We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks' time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like in 10 or 20 years from now.

I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations.

This implies two very strange rules for VCs. First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. This is a scary rule, because it eliminates the vast majority of possible investments. (Even quite successful companies usually succeed on a more humble scale.) This leads to rule number two: because rule number one is so restrictive, there can't be any other rules.

I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.

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

Whoever is first to dominate the most important segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole market.

The something of somewhere is mostly just the nothing of nowhere.

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

Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos's founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books. There were millions of books to catalog, but they all had roughly the same shape, they were easy to ship, and some of the most rarely sold books - those least profitable for any retail store to keep in stock - also drew the most enthusiastic customers. Amazon became the dominant solution for anyone located far from a bookstore or seeking something unusual. Amazon then had two options: expand the number of people who read books, or expand to adjacent markets. They chose the latter, starting with the most similar markets: CDs, videos, and software. Amazon continued to add categories gradually until it had become the world's general store. The name itself brilliantly encapsulated the company's scaling strategy.

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.

Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students - Mark Zuckerberg's first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don't even appear to be business opportunities at

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

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

There are many more secrets in the world that are waiting to be found. The question of how many secrets exist in our world is roughly equivalent to how many startups people should start.

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.

Every time we create something new we go from zero to one.

Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.

The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking.

not why it's important in general, but why you're doing something important that no one else is going to get done. That's the only thing that can make its importance unique.

Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.

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

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.

People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.

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

I'm in favor of free trade, but I think if you had to make a choice between having technological progress versus free trade, you had one or the other, you should always pick technological progress. I think it's an incredibly important variable for creating more prosperity.

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.

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.

network effects businesses must start with especially small markets.

Creative monopolies aren't just good for the rest of society; they're powerful engines for making it better.

How to teach people to do what hasn't been done is a great riddle.

Spiraling demand for resources of which our world contains a finite supply is the great long-term threat posed by globalisation. That is why we need new technology to relieve it.

Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'

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.

If you think something hard is impossible, you'll never even start trying to achieve it.

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.

If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world-changing companies yet to be started. This

In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition,

we don't live in a normal world; we live under a power law.

But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism.

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.

Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.

We need more pessimism that the future might be a lot worse, and we need more optimism that the future might be better.

Americans mythologized competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines.

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.

The era of cornucopian hope was relabeled as an era of crazed greed and declared to be definitely over.

pessimism works because it's self-fulfilling: if you're a slacker with low expectations, they'll probably be met.

but how to establish a process by which a sales team of modest size can move the product to a wide audience.

In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming found that a mysterious antibacterial fungus had grown on a petri dish he'd forgotten to cover in his laboratory: he discovered penicillin by accident. Scientists have sought to harness the power of chance ever since. Modern drug discovery aims to amplify Fleming's serendipitous circumstances a millionfold: pharmaceutical companies search through combinations of molecular compounds at random, hoping to find a hit.

only by believing in and looking for secrets could you see beyond the convention to an opportunity hidden in plain sight.

Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.

Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.

A diploma is a dunce hat in disguise.

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.

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.

when I arrived at Stanford in 1985, economics, not computer science, was the most popular major. To most people on campus, the tech sector seemed idiosyncratic or even provincial.

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.

Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.

Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.

Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.

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.

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.

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.

The optimism that many felt in the 1960s over labour-saving technology is giving way to a fearful question: 'Will your labour be good for anything in the future? Or will you be replaced by a machine?'

If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn't create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake.

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

the best way to create productivity is "to get rid of people.

I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.

Great things happen only once.

If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.

small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better.

One of the reasons I think people are increasingly nervous about U.S. debt is because they think that we are not actually digging ourselves out of the hole, but instead are digging ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole and will not be able to pay it back because we're not actually creating the new technologies that will enable us to pay back and the money somehow is not really being invested in the future or in progress.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Google makes so much money that it's now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined.

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

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

Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

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.

It's good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work.

many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn't.

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.

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.

People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.

In Silicon Valley, I point out that many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger's where it's like you're missing the imitation, socialization gene.

invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit - got

By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready--for nothing in particular.

Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable.

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.