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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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Peter Thiel
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: October 11
Banker
Chess Player
Computer Scientist
Entrepreneur
Financier
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Peter Andreas Thiel
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Done
Strategy
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Signaling
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There are many more secrets in the world that are waiting to be found. The question of how many secrets exist in our world is roughly equivalent to how many startups people should start.
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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.
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Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation.
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University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it's not a consumption decision, it's an investment decision. Actually, no, it's a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties.
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Society is secretly driven by sales
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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.
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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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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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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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Great tech opportunities happen only once.
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What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.
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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.
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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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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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All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
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In the U.S., we fundamentally need to do new things, which I think is harder for the government to do. And moreover, it is not something our government actually is inclined to particularly do.
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Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.
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I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
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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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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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