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
It's good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work.
Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?
We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.
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.
Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.
Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.
Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits.
Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like technology.
The model of the U.S. economy is that we are the country that does new things.
You don't want to just do 'me too' companies that are copying what others are doing.
An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role.
As an undergraduate at Stanford, I started 'The Stanford Review,' which ended up being very engaged in the hot debates of the time: campus speech codes, questions about diversity on campus, all sorts of debates like that.
Unsolved problems are where you'll find opportunity. Energy is one sector with extremely urgent unsolved problems.
I think what's always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth.