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I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

Peter Thiel

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Peter Thiel
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: October 11
Banker
Chess Player
Computer Scientist
Entrepreneur
Financier
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Peter Andreas Thiel
Democracy
Freedom
Believe
Compatible
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More quotes by Peter Thiel

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I'm skeptical of a lot of what falls under the rubric of education.... People are on these tracks. They are getting these credentials and it's very unclear how viable they are in many cases.
Peter Thiel
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Every university…seem[s] to reassure you that ‘it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.’ That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly at something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
Peter Thiel
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Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.
Peter Thiel
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Twitter is hard to evaluate. They have a lot of potential. It's a horribly mismanaged company — probably a lot of pot-smoking going on there. But it's such a solid franchise it may even work with all that.
Peter Thiel
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People working on bigger ideas on a more protracted timeline will be more on the stealth side. They aren’t releasing new PR announcements every day. The bigger the secret and the likelier it is that you alone have it, the more time you have to execute. There may be far more people going after hard secrets than we think.
Peter Thiel
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I think somehow people should be encouraged to think about a very long time horizon and I think this is true for businesses, it's true for governments and it's true for people doing things in the non-profit sector.
Peter Thiel
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Distribution may not matter in fictional worlds, but it matters in most. The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make this happen, and it's harder than it looks.
Peter Thiel
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American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future.
Peter Thiel
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The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present.
Peter Thiel
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What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Peter Thiel
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Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
Peter Thiel
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The zero-sum world [the movie The Social Network] portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood.
Peter Thiel
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There is perhaps no specific time that is necessarily right to start your company or start your life. But some times and some moments seem more auspicious than others. Now is such a moment. If we don’t take charge and usher in the future - if you don’t take charge of your life - there is the sense that no one else will.
Peter Thiel
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Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
Peter Thiel
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When you are starting a new business you don't want to go after giant markets. You want to go after small markets and take over those markets quickly.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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You'll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it's important in general, but why you're doing something important that no one else is going to get done.
Peter Thiel
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Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation.
Peter Thiel
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Competition is overrated. In practice it is quite destructive and should be avoided wherever possible. Much better than fighting for scraps in existing markets is to create and own new ones.
Peter Thiel
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Moving first is a tactic, not a goal.
Peter Thiel