Quote

My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.

Peter Thiel

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Peter Thiel
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: October 11
Banker
Chess Player
Computer Scientist
Entrepreneur
Financier
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Peter Andreas Thiel
World
Question
People
Technology
Answers
Future
Truth
Globalization
Matter
Defined
Think
Matters
Thinking
Answer

More quotes by Peter Thiel

Image
The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.
Peter Thiel
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What valuable company is nobody building?
Peter Thiel
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Big part of the challenge to innovation is that people too easily resign themselves to dying.
Peter Thiel
Image
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.
Peter Thiel
Image
I think in my twenties I tended to think of all people as sort of more or less alike. In now think that people are really different in all these subtle ways that are very important.
Peter Thiel
Image
I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years - part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.
Peter Thiel
Image
There's been a lot companies that have shown zero to one kind of growth in the computer, internet software age. Facebook and Google are zero to one companies. Apple's iPhone was the first smartphone that really works, and of course, then you scale it horizontally, but the vertical component was really critical. Space X would also be one.
Peter Thiel
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.
Peter Thiel
Image
In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.
Peter Thiel
Image
Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.
Peter Thiel
Image
If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.
Peter Thiel
Image
Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.
Peter Thiel
Image
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
Image
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Peter Thiel