Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important s… - Peter Thiel

Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.

A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.

Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future

We didn’t assemble a mafia by sorting through résumés and simply hiring the most talented people. I had seen the mixed results of that approach firsthand when I worked at a New York law firm. 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.

the Apple Stores’ sleek minimalist design and close control over the consumer experience, the omnipresent advertising campaigns, the price positioning as a maker of premium goods, and the lingering nimbus of Steve Jobs’s personal charisma all contribute to a perception that Apple offers products so good as to constitute a category of their own.

The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that “it sells itself.” But anyone who would actually say this about a real product must be lying: either he’s delusional (lying to himself) or he’s selling something (and thereby contradicting himself).