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Peter Thiel Quotes

Total quotes: 14
“It's always a mistake to be too focused on prestige and status...I would always be long substance, short status.”
— Peter Thiel
Tagged: Life
“Education has become a substitute for thinking about the future.”
— Peter Thiel, Thiel Says College as Corrupt as Church 500 Years Ago
Tagged: Collage, Higher Education, Future Planning
“The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.”
— Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Tagged: Business Evolution, Iteration, Start Small, Startup, Target Markets
“When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”
— Peter Thiel, Read Peter Thiel's Speech at the Republican Convention
Tagged: Soviet Union, Culture Wars, Election 2016
“The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind.”
— Peter Thiel, Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Tagged: Ego is the Enemy
“Inside a firm, people become obsessed with their competitors for career advancement. Then the firms themselves become obsessed with their competitors in the marketplace. Amid all the human drama, people lose sight of what matters and focus on their rivals instead.”
— Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Tagged: Business, Carrers, Competition, Drama
“I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations. I think much more highly of journalists than that. It’s precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker.”
— Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War With Gawker
Tagged: Gawker Media, Silent Legal Wars, Privacy, Thiel vs. Gawker
“Every moment in business happens only once.”
— Peter Thiel, Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Tagged: first lines of books
“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? Numbers alone won't tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”
— Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Tagged: Growing A Business, Growing Up, Long-Term Thinking, Number
“It’s not for me to decide what happens to Gawker. If America rallies around Gawker and decides we want more people to be outed and more sex tapes to be posted without consent, then they will find a way to save Gawker, and I can’t stop it.”
— Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War With Gawker
Tagged: Gawker Media, Silent Legal Wars, Sex Tapes, Thiel vs. Gawker
“As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage. Anything less than an order of magnitude better will probably be perceived as a marginal improvement and will be hard to sell, especially in an already crowded market.”
— Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Tagged: Innovation, Investment, Technology
“In 2009, Blake sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and faculty members, and Stanford Hospital runs on Box. If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing. A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.”
— Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Tagged: Box, Box.com, Growing A Business, Inc., Personal Sales, Sales
“College is corrupt as the Catholic church was 500 years ago. They’re charging people more and more. You have this system of indulgences, you have this priestly (professorial class) that doesn't do much work. And then you basically tell people that if you get a diploma you’re saved, otherwise you go to hell. And we need to push back on this idea that only way you get saved is the Catholic church 500 years ago, or today by getting a diploma from college.”
— Peter Thiel, Thiel Says College as Corrupt as Church 500 Years Ago
Tagged: God Is Still Here (Not Dead), The New Church Ladies, Education, Secularized Theology, Secular Theology
“Like acting, sales works best when hidden. This explains why almost everyone whose job involves distribution— whether they're in sales, marketing, or advertising— has a job title that has nothing to do with those things. People who sell advertising are called 'account executives.' People who sell customers work in 'business development.' People who sell companies are 'investment bankers.' And people who sell themselves are called 'politicians.' There's a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we're being sold.”
— Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Tagged: Advertising, Business, Personal Sales, Sales, Selling
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