Top 15 Peter Thiel Quotes

In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready — for nothing in particular.

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

once you’re 10x better, you escape competition.

First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.

anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter.

EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

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.

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

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

people then products then traffic then revenue.

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

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

Eroom’s law — that’s Moore’s law backward — observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950.

If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.