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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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Peter Thiel
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: October 11
Banker
Chess Player
Computer Scientist
Entrepreneur
Financier
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Peter Andreas Thiel
Crazy
Two
Kind
World
Businesses
Kinds
Competition

More quotes by Peter Thiel

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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.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.
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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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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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.
Peter Thiel
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The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present.
Peter Thiel
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What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.
Peter Thiel
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Society is secretly driven by sales
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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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
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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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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
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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.
Peter Thiel
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Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.
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