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
In the developed world, technological progress means that you can have a situation where there's growth, where there's a way in which everybody can be better off over time.
The debt austerity would not be problems if we had technological progress. If you doubled the debt in the U.S., and the size of the economy doubled because of technological progress and growth, the two would roughly cancel out and it would all be a totally manageable situation.
In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.
If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now?
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.
People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.
Technologies like PayPal foster competition because they enable people to shift their funds from one jurisdiction to another, and I think that ultimately will lead to a world in which there's less government power and therefore more individual control.
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.
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.
There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley.
I would not describe myself as a super early adopter of consumer technology.
I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.
Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'