Peter thiel quotes

Society is secretly driven by sales

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.'

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.

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.

If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future.

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.

All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.

If you invest in Microsoft or Oracle, or a number of other companies for that matter, you're fundamentally making a bet that there's going to be no innovation. So an investment in Microsoft is a bet that the operating system is going to stay the same, it won't be replaced by Linux, Google Docs, or a mobile platform like iOS or Android.

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

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.

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.

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

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.

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

What valuable company is nobody building?

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.

There are only two kinds of businesses in this world: Businesses in crazy competition, and businesses that are one of a kind.

Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation.

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.

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?

Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous.

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.

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.

I'm always very excited about trying to do something on next-generation biotechnology and life sciences because I think if we can cure cancer or dementia, we can really make the future a lot better and I think these things are eminently doable.

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.

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

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.

Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

For a new payment product, you always have to ask, how much better is it than the current solution? So when we started Paypal, for eBay micro merchants, it was much better than getting the 7 to 10 days process of cashing a check in the mail. When you look at stores or physical worlds, places, a lot of these places are already set up to take cash or credit card. Apple Pay may be an incremental improvement, maybe a little bit better. But when you have something that's pretty good and you go to something that's perfect, sometimes it's very hard to drive adoption because the delta is not that big.

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.

Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

Big part of the challenge to innovation is that people too easily resign themselves to dying.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

In the U.S., we fundamentally need to do new things, which I think is harder for the government to do. And moreover, it is not something our government actually is inclined to particularly do.

The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.

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.

I think China thinks information technology is less important than we think it is in the US, economically, and more important politically. And so Chinese internet companies are extremely political, they're protected behind the great firewall of China, and investment in Alibaba is good as long as Jack Ma stays in the good graces of the Chinese communist party. Alibaba is largely copying various business models from the US; they have combined some things in interesting new ways, but I think it's fundamentally a business that works because of the political protection you get in China.

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

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.

When you already have $150 billion a year in revenues from the iPhone, it's very hard to come up with any new vertical that will sort of move the dial. And there's this sort of weird effect where the larger a company gets, the harder it is to come up with any new product that really moves the dial.

In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

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

Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness.

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

A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed.

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.

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 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.

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

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

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.

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.

Luck is like an atheistic word for God.

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

Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

Moving first is a tactic, not a goal.

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.

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Forget startup companies. The next frontier is startup countries.

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.

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.

A lot of the key to Apple's succes is Designing technology in order to hide it.

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

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

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.

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.

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.

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.

I do think Tim Cook is doing a very good job, I think he has almost impossibly big shoes to fill with Steve Jobs' departure. And so, that's the context always someone has to put things in. But, I do think that for the most part that Apple is at a point where it's much more focused on scale than on doing new things.

Great tech opportunities happen only once.

Every university…seem[s] to reassure you that ‘it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.’ That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly at something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.

No company has a culture; every company is a culture.

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

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

There's been a lot companies that have shown "zero to one" kind of growth in the computer, internet software age. Facebook and Google are zero to one companies. Apple's iPhone was the first smartphone that really works, and of course, then you scale it horizontally, but the vertical component was really critical. Space X would also be one.

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.

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

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

Whatever the career, sales ability distinguishes superstars from also-rans.

The idea of becoming an entrepreneur is something that is not taught very well in school and is something that people should try to do earlier on.

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?

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

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.

Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.