Top 200 Peter Thiel Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 5

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

— Peter Thiel

202. “There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.”

— Peter Thiel

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

— Peter Thiel

204. “The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.”

— Peter Thiel

205. “Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know.”

— Peter Thiel

206. “Your company needs to sell more than its product. You must also sell your company to employees and investors.”

— Peter Thiel

207. “Take the hidden paths.”

— Peter Thiel

208. “We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks’ time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like in 10 or 20 years from now.”

— Peter Thiel

209. “Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.”

— Peter Thiel

210. “Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.”

— Peter Thiel

211. “As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”

— Peter Thiel

212. “If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it.”

— Peter Thiel

213. “Google’s search algorithms, for example, return results better than anyone else’s. Proprietary technologies for extremely short page load times and highly accurate query autocompletion add to the core search product’s robustness and defensibility. It.”

— Peter Thiel

214. “Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better – to.”

— Peter Thiel

215. “For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated. Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO – that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups. In no case should a CEO of an early-stage, venture-backed startup receive more than $150,000 per year in salary. It.”

— Peter Thiel

216. “Sequencing markets correctly is underrated, and it takes discipline to expand gradually. 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

217. “In a single tweet, Yahoo! summarized Mayer’s plan as a chain reaction of “people then products then traffic then revenue.”

— Peter Thiel

218. “Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work – going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things – going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.”

— Peter Thiel

219. “Doing something different is what’s truly good for society – and it’s also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. 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

220. “You should never assume that people will admire your company without a public relations strategy.”

— Peter Thiel

221. “It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there.”

— Peter Thiel

222. “Talented people don’t need to work for you; they have plenty of options. You should ask yourself a more pointed version of the question: Why would someone join your company as its 20th engineer when she could go work at Google for more money and more prestige?”

— Peter Thiel

223. “The lawyers I worked with ran a valuable business, and they were impressive individuals one by one. But the relationships between them were oddly thin. They spent all day together, but few of them seemed to have much to say to each other outside the office. Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other?”

— Peter Thiel

224. “VCs must find the handful of companies that will successfully go from 0 to 1 and then back them with every resource.”

— Peter Thiel

225. “This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%.”

— Peter Thiel

226. “That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: you can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead ask yourself: how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”

— Peter Thiel

227. “From the start, I wanted PayPal to be tightly knit instead of transactional.”

— Peter Thiel

228. “It was much easier to reach a few thousand people who really needed our product than to try to compete for the attention of millions of scattered individuals.”

— Peter Thiel

229. “Amazon made its first 10x improvement in a particularly visible way: they offered at least 10 times as many books as any other bookstore.”

— Peter Thiel

230. “Advertising can work for startups, too, but only when your customer acquisition costs and customer lifetime value make every other distribution channel uneconomical.”

— Peter Thiel

231. “If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it.”

— Peter Thiel

232. “Es imposible encontrar secretos si no los buscas.”

— Peter Thiel

233. “Anyone who prefers owning a 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. Equity can’t create perfect incentives, but it’s the best way for a founder to keep everyone in the company broadly aligned.”

— Peter Thiel

234. “Disruption also attracts attention: disruptors are people who look for trouble and find it.”

— Peter Thiel

235. “A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.”

— Peter Thiel

236. “When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.”

— Peter Thiel

237. “This leads to a second, less obvious understanding of the founding: it lasts as long as a company is creating new things, and it ends when creation stops. If you get the founding moment right, you can do more than create a valuable company: you can steer its distant future toward the creation of new things instead of the stewardship of inherited success. You might even extend its founding indefinitely.”

— Peter Thiel

238. “The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme; we need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.”

— Peter Thiel

239. “Instead of violent wars there could be violent video games. Instead of heroic feats, there could be thrilling amusement park rides. Instead of serious thought, there could be intrigues of all sorts as if in a soap opera. It is a world where people spend their lives amusing themselves to death.”

— Peter Thiel