Peter Thiel Quotes

Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.

To an indefinite optimist, the future will be better, but he doesn't know how exactly, so he won't make any specific plans. He expects to profit from the future but sees no reason to design it concretely.

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

We knew we'd need more funding to reach that goal. We also knew that the boom was going to end. Since we didn't expect investors' faith in our mission to survive the coming crash, we moved fast to raise funds while we could.

Sometimes you have to fight. Where that's true, you should fight and win. There is no middle ground: either don't throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.

Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

It's true that every great entrepreneur is first and foremost a designer.

Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.

In philosophy, politics, and business too, arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.

Every moment in business happens only once.

The durability question is at least as important as growth; hyper growth without durability is what often leads to miscalibrated valuations in our industry.

The claim I make in my book is that every successful company is a monopoly, and competition is for losers.

An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it.

Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it "well-roundedness", a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it.

Always err on the side of starting too small.

However, any firm with close substitutes will see its profits competed away.

Winning is better than losing but everybody loses when the war isn't one worth fighting.

We knew we'd need more funding to reach that goal. We also knew that the boom was going to end. Since we didn't expect investors' faith in our mission to survive the coming crash, we moved fast to raise funds while we could.

What I’ve found is that the answers lie in some tough questions. The ones that people have a really hard time answering either because it’s hard to have a truly unique perspective, or because it takes a certain level of courage to speak up about them honestly.

If you have something truly unique, it is often hard to explain to people what you’re doing.

My feeling is that monopolies tend to be bad when you’re dealing with a market situation where no one is challenging the status quo (i.e.: telephone companies creating artificial scarcity).

All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

If you believe your life is mainly a matter of chance, why read this book? Learning about startups is worthless if you're just reading stories about people who won the lottery.

However, the phenomenon of serial entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of chance.

...being the first mover doesn't do you any good if someone comes along and unseats you.

Disruption also attracts attention: disruptors are people who look for trouble and find it. Disruptive kids get sent to the principal's office. Disruptive companies often pick fights they can't win.

A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it.

To a definite optimist, the future will be better than the present if he plans and works to make it better.