Peter Thiel

Businessman

1967-10-11

Quotes by Peter Thiel

• People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.

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• Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.

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• If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done.

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• The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them.

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• The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

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

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• There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.

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• I would consider myself a rather staunch libertarian.

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• I had a good experience in college, but I don't think interdisciplinary education is something that's stressed very much at all. It's generally considered to be something of a bad idea.

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• We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.

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• I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones.

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• I think competition can make people stronger at whatever it is they're competing on. If we're competing in some athletic event for competitive swimmers, really intensely competing, it's likely that both of us will become better, but it's also quite possible we'll lose sight of what's truly valuable.

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• My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing.

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• My hope is that we're going to end up with a far more tolerant society, where the erosion of privacy, to the extent it erodes, will be offset by increased tolerance.

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• Monopolies are bad and deserve their reputation when things are static and the monopolies function as toll collectors... But I think they're quite positive when they're dynamic and do something new.

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• People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.

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• I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.

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• As an undergraduate at Stanford, I started 'The Stanford Review,' which ended up being very engaged in the hot debates of the time: campus speech codes, questions about diversity on campus, all sorts of debates like that.

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• I think it's always good for gay people to come out, but it's also understandable why people might choose not to do so.

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• Airbnb is undervalued.

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