Peter Thiel

“I was sitting in the cinema watching The Social Network with Jesse Eisenberg, and I saw Peter Thiel and Clarion Capital investing in Facebook in that film, and I thought, that looks like a pretty, pretty sweet deal. And, you know, actually I think I was about …”

“Four out of the top 10 VCs, Steve Anderson, Chris Saka, Josh Copeland, Peter Thiel, In that they didn't have firms 10 years ago, right?”

“VC is incentivized to build people up. You know, what I mean by that is as an investor, you want to invest in somebody and make them richer than yourself. Example, Peter Thiel investing in the young Mark Zuckerberg put 500,000 dollars into Zuckerberg. Thiel ma…”

“I got the call from Peter saying, hey, come on down, and we're starting a company. We'd like you to be one of the first engineers and flew down to have dinner with him about the same time that he wrote the 500,000 dollar check to Facebook.”

“I personally have no regrets about having taken his investment, and I would do so again in a heartbeat, and I would work with him in the future on other companies if that were ever in the cards.”

“What he's looking for, and I agree with, is you want to become a monopolist in a small market with a lot of adjacencies.”

“It's also one of the favorites of Daniel Eck at Spotify, Peter Thiel, and Reed Hastings at Netflix.”

“So like Tesla, I remember famously Peter Thiel's are saying it's a bankrupt idea. The battery technology will never scale. Batteries will never improve. UVs will never work. And I was like, wow, that was just before the Model S. I mean, literally a week before…”

“Peter was willing to fund the company with about five million dollars, but fundamentally, to buy enough homes and prove that you could accurately price the homes, five million was at the very low end of what would be feasibly, statistically, to prove that we c…”

“Peter and I figured out this market was crashing last summer, and we really tried to stop people from investing at ridiculous prices, but even the founders thought we weren't totally successful.”

“Both Peter and I figured out this market was crashing last summer, and we really tried to stop people from investing at ridiculous prices, but even a founder's fund, we weren't totally successful.”

“My partner, Peter Thiel is. Brilliant macroeconomist and probably the best in the business at this, and he can't even predict this, right? Like predicting macro is extremely hard.”

“Because enterprise is a multi-polar world. It's not winner-takes-all. I mean, Peter Thiel's power laws works really well in consumer, but in enterprise, there's so many modes. I mean, compliance, regulatory, Incompetence.”

“In my core relationships Founders Fund's the most extreme, because Peter Thiel's very contrarian and he wants to reset the mindset of his team. Which I think is great. But Andreessen Horowitz, Green Oaks Thrive, they've all proactively marked down their compan…”

“We tried for like the first Five years to raise money. We tried many times. We tried angels. We tried, I met Peter Thiel. I went, I met a bunch of different angels. I went up and down. I used all my connections up and down Silicon, you know, Sand Hill road to …”

“Usually there's like one reason that dominates all the other reasons. And if you have three or four reasons for something, that means you have no reason for something. Like if you have four ways, you're going to make money. You have zero ways. You're going to …”

“The lesson was that I probably should have held everything for an extra 10 or 15 years, and I, and Peter Thiel had the same lesson, and I've learned a lot from Peter, and he obviously sold out of Facebook too soon, too”

“There was a restaurant that I think ended up losing seven million dollars because the chef got into arguments with people.”

“And this, for example, is why Founders Fund was why Peter put us in San Francisco when everyone else was on Sand Hill, because he wanted us to avoid getting caught up in this, like, are they going and meeting all the way down the street with all the other peop…”

“When we started out, when Postmates started out, this thing sounded so crazy that the only people that wanted to give us money were Brian Singerman and Peter Thiel.”

“Oh look, super smart. I'd say his biggest strength Is a willingness to be contrarian based on first principles and an absolute, like, maximization of speed. Right? Like, can we have this done by the end of the day? But, you know, that kind of thing. And I thin…”

“The day that acquisition of PayPal by eBay was announced Peter had resigned, and I met him up at the Sundeck restaurant in up on Sand Hill Road, and he said, you know, Kevin, I'm working on this business, and, you know, we're taking kind of the fraud algorithm…”

“He values sort of people that are willing to actually sort of disagree and stand up to him so much so that I think it's incentivizes behavior internally where people proactively want to disagree with him more than others.”

“He does a phenomenal job of that, of structuring his, you know, sort of logistic arguments and frameworks in a way where if you disagree with him, You by default just look like a buffoon because of the fundamental way that the argument is basically, you know, …”

“I pitched Peter Thiel, and I was so green, and I'd just gotten back from Afghanistan, and I literally would go to work in slacks and leather shoes, like a business lawyer-looking type person, and the Founders Fund guys, at least in those days, did not respect …”

“We raised a pre-seed from Peter Thiel, and Floodgate, and then our seed from Mike Volpe at Index”

“You can bucket great founders into three backgrounds. The most common is that you have kind of a messed up childhood. The second most common would be, ah, you're gay, and the third most common would be you were adopted. Look at like a list of all-time greats. …”

“We ended up talking for, I think, like, four or five hours about Not only the company and all of the flaws that I had in my business model, but then also math and deep esoteric philosophy and like just the world. And he said, you know, I'm not investing at the…”

“They both have this amazing quality that I spent as much time absorbing as I could over times that I worked with them, where they bring out The best effort in people around them. Like they somehow make you feel that you can and should do better work.”

“If I could have a choice between starting a company with Peter or starting a company with Elon, it'd be a very hard choice to make. I think Peter is a more known quantity for me.”

“I think it's bullshit to be honest when people say European entrepreneurs don't work as hard, are not as ambitious. You know, I've heard Peter Thiel and like others say that, but I think that's BS to be honest.”

“Peter, I think so much of his cleverness and so much of his genius is actually in the way that he builds his firms rather even than his investments.”

“He had, like, a bonus system for PayPal employees. If they lived within, like, a couple miles of the office, you'd give them more money.”

“He fired him, but he treated him like a human being. Okay. He vest fully vested all his stock, took nothing out of his pocket, thanked him for it and told him that was the way it was going to be.”

“By the way, Peter Thiel does that really well. Nobody else does that well.”

“Best offer I got was two 75, but the firm wants board control. So if you'll just do it without taking the control of the board, you guys can have it. And Peter just offered 300 instead of two 75, which wasn't as good as my 500, but he didn't need to do that. I…”