Peter Thiel Quotes

Properly understood, technology is the one way for us to escape competition in a globalizing world. As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements.

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.

PayPal, por ejemplo, hizo que las compras y las ventas de eBay fueran diez veces mejores.

Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior,

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business

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

However, for equity to create commitment rather than conflict, you must allocate it very carefully. Giving everyone equal shares is usually a mistake: every individual has different talents and responsibilities as well as different opportunity costs, so equal amounts will seem arbitrary and unfair from the start. On the other hand, granting different amounts up front is just as sure to seem unfair. Resentment at this stage can kill a company, but there’s no ownership formula to perfectly avoid it.

If we define the future as a time that looks different from the present, then most people aren’t expecting any future at all.

successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.

But entrepreneurs should take cultures of extreme dedication seriously.

Every other country is afraid that China is going to take over the world; China is the only country afraid that it won’t.

we don’t live in a normal world; we live under a power law.

This problem becomes even more acute over time as more people join the company. Early employees usually get the most equity because they take more risk, but some later employees might be even more crucial to a venture’s success. A secretary who joined eBay in 1996 might have made 200 times more than her industry-veteran boss who joined in 1999.

no entres en la guerra de las gratificaciones. Todo aquel que se sienta más influido por el servicio gratuito de lavandería o por la guardería de mascotas será un mal fichaje para tu equipo.

proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding