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
If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don't, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there's no progress and basically everybody's gain is somebody else's loss.
The zero-sum world [the movie The Social Network] portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood.
Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
Every time we create something new we go from zero to one.
It is sort of a bit of a caricature of capitalism, that it's always this zero-sum game where you have winners and losers. Silicon Valley, the technology industry at its best, creates a situation where everybody can be a winner.
The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.
When parents have invested enormous amounts of money in their kids' education, to find their kids coming back to live with them - well, that was not what they bargained for.
Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable.
Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people.
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.
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?'
I did not want to write just another business book.
Ideally, I want us to be working on things where if we're not working on them, they won't happen; companies where if we don't fund them they will not receive funding.