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Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.

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
School
People
Bombs
Six
Built
Started
High
Four

More quotes by Peter Thiel

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The business model piece is we're always talking about competing more effectively. If you're starting a company or career you don't want to compete. You want to create a monopoly. We want to invest in a company that has a good plan to create a monopoly.
Peter Thiel
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Big part of the challenge to innovation is that people too easily resign themselves to dying.
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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I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Peter Thiel
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Education needs to be rethought. Education does not just happen in college, but it also happens in developing skills which will enable people to contribute to our society as a whole.
Peter Thiel
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There are only two kinds of businesses in this world: Businesses in crazy competition, and businesses that are one of a kind.
Peter Thiel
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We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness.
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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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
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The developing world can just do things that are extensive or horizontal, that basically copy. The developed world needs to do things that are intensive or vertical, where we take our civilization to the next level.
Peter Thiel
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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
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There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them.
Peter Thiel
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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.
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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In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).
Peter Thiel
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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
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If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future.
Peter Thiel
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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
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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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Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.
Peter Thiel