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If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future.

Peter Thiel

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Peter Thiel
Age: 56
Born: 1967
Born: October 11
Banker
Chess Player
Computer Scientist
Entrepreneur
Financier
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Peter Andreas Thiel
Technology
Future
Reason
Would
People
Pessimistic
Super
Optimistic

More quotes by Peter Thiel

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Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.
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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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We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness.
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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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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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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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The developing world can just do things that are extensive or horizontal, that basically copy. The developed world needs to do things that are intensive or vertical, where we take our civilization to the next level.
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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.
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Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.
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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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I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
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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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The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present.
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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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Big part of the challenge to innovation is that people too easily resign themselves to dying.
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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 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.
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Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.
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Great tech opportunities happen only once.
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All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
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