Peter Thiel Quotes

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.

As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.

By definition, a secret hasn’t been vetted by the mainstream.

Loiseau killed himself anyway in 2003 when a competing French dining guide downgraded his restaurant.) The competitive ecosystem pushes people toward ruthlessness or death.

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.

Competitive markets destroy profits.

The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is “big data.” Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).

En los grandes contratos, la política importa tanto como el ingenio tecnológico, así que no fue fácil.

Success is never accidental.

But entrepreneurs should take cultures of extreme dedication seriously.

to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.

Company culture” doesn’t exist apart from the company itself: no company has a culture; every company is a culture. A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.

pessimism works because it’s self-fulfilling: if you’re a slacker with low expectations, they’ll probably be met.

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

Fourth is “flatness.” As globalization advances, people perceive the world as one homogeneous, highly competitive marketplace: the world is “flat.” Given that assumption, anyone who might have had the ambition to look for a secret will first ask himself: if it were possible to discover something new, wouldn’t someone from the faceless global talent pool of smarter and more creative people have found it already?