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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.

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
Unique
Superiors
Unless
Solution
Technology
Customers
Particular
Stuck
Small
Solve
Monopolize
Care
Competition
Solves
Problem
Solutions
Vicious
Way
Market
Superior

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What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
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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.
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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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Society is secretly driven by sales
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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.
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Moving first is a tactic, not a goal.
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Anyone who prefers owning part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company's value in the future.
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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.
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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.
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Thinking about how disturbingly herdlike people become in so many different contexts - mimetic theory forces you to think about that, which is knowledge that's generally suppressed and hidden. 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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Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.
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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 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.
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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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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.
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