Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel
Peter Andreas Thielis a German-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and hedge fund manager. Thiel co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin and Elon Musk and served as its CEO. He also co-founded Palantir, of which he is chairman. He was the first outside investor in Facebook, the popular social-networking site, with a 10.2% stake acquired in 2004 for $500,000, and sits on the company's board of directors...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth11 October 1967
CountryUnited States of America
I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it's something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn't compute with our existing educational system.
Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.
Thinking about how disturbingly herdlike people become in so many different contexts—mimetic theory forces you to think about that, which is knowledge that’s generally suppressed and hidden. 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.
What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.
Secrets are hard but solvable problems and we should talk about them. It's hard to work toward a radically better future if you don't believe in secrets.
No company has a culture, every company is a culture
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.
First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.
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.
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.
If they don't go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers.
Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation.
Whatever the career, sales ability distinguishes superstars from also-rans.
Most people are average. Founders are not. Founders' traits seem to have an inverse normal distribution to them.