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
The optimism that many felt in the 1960s over labour-saving technology is giving way to a fearful question: 'Will your labour be good for anything in the future? Or will you be replaced by a machine?'
From my perspective, I think the question of how we build a better future is an extremely important overarching question, and I think it's become obscured from us because we no longer think it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about the future.
All of us have to work toward a definite future... that can motivate and inspire people to change the world.
There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.
I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations.
Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.
All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.
Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced, and there must be an intense belief in it.
Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.
The big challenge with Internet financial services has been that it's very difficult to get large numbers of customers to sign up for your service.
The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.
I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.
Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?