Peter Thiel Quotes
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101. “Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

103. “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

104. “Indefinite fears about the far future shouldn’t stop us from making definite plans today.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

106. “Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.”

— Peter Thiel

107. “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.”

— Peter Thiel

108. “Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth.”

— Peter Thiel

109. “Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business – the creation of new value – cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.”

— Peter Thiel

110. “Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.”

— Peter Thiel

111. “Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

113. “Network effects can be powerful, but you’ll never reap them unless your product is valuable to its very first users when the network is necessarily small.”

— Peter Thiel

114. “Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win. There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.”

— Peter Thiel

115. “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

116. “Thiel’s law”: a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.”

— Peter Thiel

117. “If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.”

— Peter Thiel

118. “The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.”

— Peter Thiel

119. “In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t.”

— Peter Thiel

120. “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.”

— Peter Thiel

121. “The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market?”

— Peter Thiel

122. “The airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone. Economists use two simplified models to explain the difference: perfect competition and monopoly.”

— Peter Thiel

123. “Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.”

— Peter Thiel

124. “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

125. “There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley.”

— Peter Thiel

126. “Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.”

— Peter Thiel

127. “Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.”

— Peter Thiel

128. “The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.”

— Peter Thiel

129. “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

130. “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

131. “When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn’t.”

— Peter Thiel

132. “A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.”

— Peter Thiel

133. “In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”

— Peter Thiel

134. “No sector will ever be so important that merely participating in it will be enough to build a great company.”

— Peter Thiel

135. “A start up messed up at the foundation cannot be fixed.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

137. “As we said, even the best venture investors have a portfolio, but investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible.”

— Peter Thiel

138. “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

139. “A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

141. “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.”

— Peter Thiel

142. “If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.”

— Peter Thiel

143. “So you might ask: are there any fields that matter but haven’t been standardized and institutionalized?”

— Peter Thiel

144. “Today our challenge is to both imagine and create the new technologies that can make the 21st century more peaceful and prosperous than the 20th.”

— Peter Thiel

145. “Everything important to us – the universe, the planet, the country, your company, your life, and this very moment – is singular.”

— Peter Thiel

146. “Recruiting should never be outsourced. Everyone at your company should be different in the same way.”

— Peter Thiel

147. “Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people.”

— Peter Thiel

148. “Every living thing is just a random iteration on some other organism, and the best iterations win.”

— Peter Thiel

149. “You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.”

— Peter Thiel

150. “Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see.”

— Peter Thiel