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?'
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?
The millennial generation in the US is the first that has reduced expectations from those of their parents. And I think there is something decadent and declinist about that.
Credentials are critical if you want to do something professional. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or professor, there is a credentialing process. But there are a lot of other things where it's not clear they're that important.
When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me - from high school to college to law school to professional life.
Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable.
Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.
There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley.
I spend an awful lot of time just thinking about what is going on in the world and talking to people about that. It's probably one of my default social activities, just getting dinners with friends.