Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced. - Peter Thiel

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?

A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly.

Proprietary technology is the most substantive advantage a company can have because it makes your product difficult or impossible to replicate. Google’s search algorithms, for example, return results better than anyone else’s.