110+ Peter Thiel Quotes (Innovative, Disruptive And Visionary)

Peter Thiel is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and hedge fund manager. He is the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and was the first outside investor in Facebook. He is also the founder of the Thiel Foundation, which is dedicated to the advancement of technological progress and long-term thinking.

Top 10 Peter Thiel Quotes

1. Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.
2. The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
3. Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.
4. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
5. 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.
6. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now?
7. There are only two kinds of businesses in this world: Businesses in crazy competition, and businesses that are one of a kind.
8. Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.
9. If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
10. Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.

Peter Thiel Short Quotes

• We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.
• Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.
• Whatever the career, sales ability distinguishes superstars from also-rans.
• All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.
• We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness.
• If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.
• Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.
• The lowest-hanging fruit in preventative medicine is just to really focus on nutrition.
• Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.
• In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

Peter Thiel Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Peter Thiel

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. — 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 a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator. — 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 to compete. You want to create a monopoly. We want to invest in a company that has a good plan to create a monopoly. — 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 a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition. — Peter Thiel

What I think people like Zuckerburg or Musk or Jeff Bezos at Amazon have in common is that they’re relentless. They don’t stop. Every day, they start over, do more, get better at it. People often ask whether Facebook was just a fluke, in the right place at the right time. But I think the more you get to know Mark or founders like him, the less plausible it becomes. And that’s, in part, because you can see how hard he works, how much planning it was, how much of a vision there was from the very beginning. — 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 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. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things; lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future. — Peter Thiel

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

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. — Peter Thiel

I'm skeptical of a lot of what falls under the rubric of education.... People are on these tracks. They are getting these credentials and it's very unclear how viable they are in many cases. — Peter Thiel

Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

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. — 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 you don't believe in secrets. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined. — Peter Thiel

It is sort of a bit of a caricature of capitalism, that it's always this zero-sum game where you have winners and losers. Silicon Valley, the technology industry at its best, creates a situation where everybody can be a winner. — Peter Thiel

All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition. — Peter Thiel

For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

Every tech story is different. Every moment in history happens only once. All successful companies are successful in their own unique way. It's your task to figure out what that future history will be. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

The debt austerity would not be problems if we had technological progress. If you doubled the debt in the U.S., and the size of the economy doubled because of technological progress and growth, the two would roughly cancel out and it would all be a totally manageable situation. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don't, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there's no progress and basically everybody's gain is somebody else's loss. — Peter Thiel

There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

I think somehow people should be encouraged to think about a very long time horizon and I think this is true for businesses, it's true for governments and it's true for people doing things in the non-profit sector. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

A company does better the less it pays the CEO. — Peter Thiel

The developing world can just do things that are extensive or horizontal, that basically copy. The developed world needs to do things that are intensive or vertical, where we take our civilization to the next level. — Peter Thiel

I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures. — Peter Thiel

Forget startup companies. The next frontier is startup countries. — Peter Thiel

Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation. — 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 why you're doing something important that no one else is going to get done. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

What valuable company is nobody building? — Peter Thiel

Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

Google makes so much money that it’s now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined. — 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 unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready-for nothing in particular. — Peter Thiel

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? — Peter Thiel

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). — Peter Thiel

My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. — Peter Thiel

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

I do think Bitcoin is the first [encrypted money] that has the potential to do something like change the world. — Peter Thiel

We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today. — Peter Thiel

You want to be the last company in a category. Those are the ones that are really valuable. — Peter Thiel

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

Thinking about how disturbingly herdlike people become in so many different contexts - mimetic theory forces you to think about that, which is knowledge that's generally suppressed and hidden. As an investor-entrepreneur, I've always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking. — Peter Thiel

Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. — Peter Thiel

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. — Peter Thiel

The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present. — Peter Thiel

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.’ — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy. — Peter Thiel

No company has a culture; every company is a culture. — Peter Thiel

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

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. — Peter Thiel

All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition. — Peter Thiel

The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths. — Peter Thiel

Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field. — Peter Thiel

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

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. — Peter Thiel

Our economy is broken. I'm not a politician, but neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America. — Peter Thiel

A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. — Peter Thiel

Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead. — Peter Thiel

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

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

Education needs to be rethought. Education does not just happen in college, but it also happens in developing skills which will enable people to contribute to our society as a whole. — Peter Thiel

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

If the slogan for Google is 'Don't be evil', then the slogan for Uber is 'Do a little bit of evil & don't get caught.' — Peter Thiel

Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous. — Peter Thiel

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. — Peter Thiel

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

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. — Peter Thiel

Life Lessons by Peter Thiel

1. Peter Thiel's success as an entrepreneur teaches us the importance of taking risks and having the courage to pursue ambitious goals.
2. His willingness to challenge conventional wisdom and think outside the box is a valuable lesson for aspiring entrepreneurs.
3. Peter Thiel's work also demonstrates the importance of networking and building relationships with the right people to help you succeed.