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
thinking creating choices
I'm in favor of free trade, but I think if you had to make a choice between having technological progress versus free trade, you had one or the other, you should always pick technological progress. I think it's an incredibly important variable for creating more prosperity.
country technology thinking
Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.
thinking long horizon
I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures.
thinking technology progress
Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.
thinking government long
I think somehow people should be encouraged to think about a very long time horizon and I think this is true for businesses, it's true for governments and it's true for people doing things in the non-profit sector.
thinking government years
I think markets are often not thinking on a long-time horizon, I think that our government structurally is doing even less so. When we have a government where we have people who are up for election at most once every six years for a U.S. senator, that's a time horizon that is much shorter than in a market that a company is looking at 10, 15, 20 years which is a time horizon over which a stock price is typically valued.
thinking people benefits
I think that markets classically fail in cases where there are public goods that provide benefits that people cannot capture. The big debate is how big these public goods are, where they exist, things of that sort.
thinking government needs
In the U.S., we fundamentally need to do new things, which I think is harder for the government to do. And moreover, it is not something our government actually is inclined to particularly do.
thinking genius brilliant
Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
powerful school thinking
But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.
real educational thinking
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.
opportunity thinking people
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.
thinking worry people
There are quite a lot of people who think my aspirations are not possible. That's a good thing. We don't need to really worry about these people very much, because since they don't think it's possible they won't take us very seriously- and they will not actually try to stop us until it's too late.
thinking might bigs
If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.