Quote

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.

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
People
Entrepreneur
Crowds
Opportunities
Tried
Places
Investor
Looking
Identify
Opportunity
Investors
Always
Crowd

More quotes by Peter Thiel

Image
A lot of the key to Apple's succes is Designing technology in order to hide it.
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
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
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
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
Image
What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.
Peter Thiel
Image
If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future.
Peter Thiel
Image
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.
Peter Thiel
Image
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
Image
If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
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
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.
Peter Thiel
Image
Big part of the challenge to innovation is that people too easily resign themselves to dying.
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
Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.
Peter Thiel
Image
What valuable company is nobody building?
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
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.
Peter Thiel
Image
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.
Peter Thiel
Image
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