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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.

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
Places
Investor
Looking
Identify
Opportunity
Investors
Always
Crowd
People
Entrepreneur
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Tried

More quotes by Peter Thiel

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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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What valuable company is nobody building?
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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'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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There are only two kinds of businesses in this world: Businesses in crazy competition, and businesses that are one of a kind.
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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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A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus.
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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.
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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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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.
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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).
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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.
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I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years - part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.
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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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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.
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We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.
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I think in my twenties I tended to think of all people as sort of more or less alike. In now think that people are really different in all these subtle ways that are very important.
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Great tech opportunities happen only once.
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A company does better the less it pays the CEO.
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Society is secretly driven by sales
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