Top 200 Peter Thiel Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Recruiting should never be outsourced. Everyone at your company should be different in the same way.”

— Peter Thiel

152. “We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences.”

— Peter Thiel

153. “So when thinking about what kind of company to build, there are two distinct questions to ask: What secrets is nature not telling you? What secrets are people not telling you?”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

155. “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

156. “Selling your company to the media is a necessary part of selling it to everyone else.”

— Peter Thiel

157. “As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements.”

— Peter Thiel

158. “If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets.”

— Peter Thiel

159. “You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.”

— Peter Thiel

160. “True heroes take their personal honor so seriously that they will fight for things that do not matter.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

162. “Or you can radically improve an existing solution: once you’re 10x better, you escape competition.”

— Peter Thiel

163. “If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.”

— Peter Thiel

164. “That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.”

— Peter Thiel

165. “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon.”

— Peter Thiel

166. “If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.”

— Peter Thiel

167. “If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.”

— Peter Thiel

168. “The hazards of imitative competition may partially explain why individuals with an Asperger’s-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today. If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

170. “Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it.”

— Peter Thiel

171. “If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right – dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in – is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.”

— Peter Thiel

172. “Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody – and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.”

— Peter Thiel

173. “For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. Those who succumb to measurement mania obsess about weekly active user statistics, monthly revenue targets, and quarterly earnings reports. However, you can hit those numbers and still overlook deeper, harder-to-measure problems that threaten the durability of your business.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

175. “Elon describes his staff this way: “If you’re at Tesla, you’re choosing to be at the equivalent of Special Forces. There’s the regular army, and that’s fine, but if you are working at Tesla, you’re choosing to step up your game.”

— Peter Thiel

176. “The convergence of desire is even more obvious at the top: all oligarchs have the same taste in Cristal, from Petersburg to Pyongyang.”

— Peter Thiel

177. “Like acting, sales works best when hidden.”

— Peter Thiel

178. “Daimler uses Tesla’s battery packs; Mercedes-Benz uses a Tesla powertrain; Toyota uses a Tesla motor. General Motors has even created a task force to track Tesla’s next moves. But.”

— Peter Thiel

179. “A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun.”

— Peter Thiel

180. “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 that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.”

— Peter Thiel

181. “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.”

— Peter Thiel

182. “Entrepreneurship: you put one dumb foot in front of the other while the world throws bricks at your head.”

— Peter Thiel

183. “People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. By definition, a secret hasn’t been vetted by the mainstream. If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right – dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in – is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.”

— Peter Thiel

184. “No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball.”

— Peter Thiel

185. “The most obvious clue was sartorial: cleantech executives were running around wearing suits and ties. This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans.”

— Peter Thiel

186. “Watson, Deep Blue, and ever-better machine learning algorithms are cool. But the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?”

— Peter Thiel

187. “Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris.”

— Peter Thiel

188. “1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes.”

— Peter Thiel

189. “Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way.”

— Peter Thiel

190. “To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.”

— Peter Thiel

191. “But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.”

— Peter Thiel

192. “CREATIVE MONOPOLY means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.”

— Peter Thiel

193. “No technology company can be built on branding alone.”

— Peter Thiel

194. “Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other?”

— Peter Thiel

195. “Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities.”

— Peter Thiel

196. “The two houses are alike, yet they hate each other. They grow even more similar as the feud escalates. Eventually, they lose sight of why they started fighting in the first place.”

— Peter Thiel

197. “If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business – no.”

— Peter Thiel

198. “College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world.”

— Peter Thiel

199. “You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel