Peter Thiel Quotes

On the inside, every individual should be sharply distinguished by her work.

no company has a culture; every company is a culture. A

The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way — a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.

The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.

progress can take one of two forms. 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. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress

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.

At the macro level, the single word for horizontal progress is globalization — taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere.

This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.

This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket rule: pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings. Maybe we still would have avoided these bad investments if we had taken the time to evaluate each company’s technology in detail. But the team insight — never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit — got us to the truth a lot faster. The best sales is hidden. 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.

Everybody has a product to sell — no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.

what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world-changing companies yet to be started.

Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous.

Competencia significa que no hay beneficios para nadie, que no hay ninguna diferenciación significativa,

La ambigüedad entre las metas sociales y económicas no ayuda. Pero la ambigüedad en el mundo «social» es un problema mayor aun: si algo es «socialmente bueno» ¿es bueno para la sociedad o simplemente es visto como algo bueno por la sociedad? Cualquier cosa lo
suficientemente buena para recibir el aplauso de todas las audiencias sólo puede ser convencional, como la idea general de la energía verde.
El progreso no se detiene por la diferencia que pueda existir entre la avaricia corporativa y la bonhomía de las organizaciones sin ánimo de lucro; en cambio, nosotros sí estamos limitados por la similitud de ambos. Igual que las corporaciones tienden a copiarse unas a otras, las organizaciones suelen tener las mismas prioridades. La tecnología limpia pone de manifiesto el resultado: cientos de productos indiferenciados, creados todos en nombre de un objetivo demasiado amplio.
Hacer algo diferente es lo realmente bueno para la sociedad, y es también lo que permite que un negocio consiga beneficios a través de la monopolización de un mercado. Los mejores proyectos suelen pasarse por alto, no son pregonados a los cuatro vientos por la multitud; los mejores problemas sobre los que trabajar suelen ser aquellos que nadie más intenta resolver.

poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.