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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.

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
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More quotes by 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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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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For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter.
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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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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I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Peter Thiel
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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.
Peter Thiel
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Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
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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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.
Peter Thiel
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What valuable company is nobody building?
Peter Thiel
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I think we have a bubble in the US in government bonds, because of the quantitative easing and the negative real interest rates, and to some extent, that increases asset values across the board, including in startups.
Peter Thiel
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A company does better the less it pays the CEO.
Peter Thiel
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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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The business model piece is we're always talking about competing more effectively. If you're starting a company or career you don't want to compete. You want to create a monopoly. We want to invest in a company that has a good plan to create a monopoly.
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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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.
Peter Thiel
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Society is secretly driven by sales
Peter Thiel
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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.
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