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Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

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
Copies
Opportunities
Worked
Causes
Opportunity
Overemphasize
Past
Slavishly
Rivalry
Copy

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Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.
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There's a wide range of sales ability: there are many gradations between novices, experts, and masters. There are even sales grandmasters. If you don't know any grandmasters, it's not because you haven't encountered them, but rather because their art is hidden in plain sight.
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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.
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The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present.
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Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.
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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.
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Big part of the challenge to innovation is that people too easily resign themselves to dying.
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I'm always very excited about trying to do something on next-generation biotechnology and life sciences because I think if we can cure cancer or dementia, we can really make the future a lot better and I think these things are eminently doable.
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We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness.
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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.
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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.
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As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don't disrupt: Avoid competition as much as possible.
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Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.
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Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.
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In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.
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Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.
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If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
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As an investor-entrepreneur, I’ve always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.
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Moving first is a tactic, not a goal.
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I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it's something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn't compute with our existing educational system.
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