Top 200 Peter Thiel Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “In the short term I want to change the world, In the long term I want to live forever.”

— Peter Thiel

105. “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

106. “I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Peter Thiel

113. “It’s a horribly mismanaged company-probably a lot of pot smoking going on there.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

117. “War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war: allegedly necessary, supposedly valiant, but ultimately destructive.”

— Peter Thiel

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

127. “Every company starts in unique circumstances, and every company starts only once.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

133. “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

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

— Peter Thiel

135. “The most successful companies make the core progression – to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets – a part of their founding narrative.”

— Peter Thiel

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

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

— Peter Thiel

143. “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

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

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

148. “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

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

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel