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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: 57
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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Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.
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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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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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People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.
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Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
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Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.
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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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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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I think somehow people should be encouraged to think about a very long time horizon and I think this is true for businesses, it's true for governments and it's true for people doing things in the non-profit sector.
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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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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.
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People working on bigger ideas on a more protracted timeline will be more on the stealth side. They aren’t releasing new PR announcements every day. The bigger the secret and the likelier it is that you alone have it, the more time you have to execute. There may be far more people going after hard secrets than we think.
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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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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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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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If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
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Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.
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Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.
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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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