Peter Thiel

“So if you know kind of the true base version of who we all are, as you watch one of these people go for something really big, like Elon Taking humanity to Mars, which is extraordinary. And yet, you know, he's a human being. Like, I've seen him sweaty and tired…”

“And people were like, did he really do that? And Keith, you know, Keith Rabolli was like, yeah, he would literally do that. He would, if you tried to bring up anything else besides your problem, he would just turn around and he would just walk away.”

“He goes, if you are 80% focused on a task, that will only be half as good as if you were 90%, meaning the jump from 80% focus to 90% focus will double your impact. And so you really want this, the last mile of focus, the last level of ruthlessness about your f…”

“When I took a job with Peter Thiel, let's imagine that there are only about a 125 people I can speak to about my work. I would say 30% of the doors closed to me, just by virtue of the fact that I worked with Peter Thiel, and I don't think he's the devil, and h…”

“In, in terms of questions of just, like, you know, business and the world, for a long time in my career, Paul Graham and Peter Thiel have been two of the people that I have learned the most from about lots of different phases of my career and are still the two…”

“Peter said, I'm so sure this is the right thing for you. Like, here's a check for 70 grand. That was how much I made at Microsoft at the time. And I said, thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to level 60 this year. Which I did, but I think …”

“I love Peter Thiel's Monopoly lectures at Stanford. He's spot on.”

“I don't think competition is what kills startups at our stages, right? It's competition makes you do stupid things like copy other players or go toward the second, a different direction.”

“Since you're such a big fan of poker, you know, we can just play a heads-up poker match for that, and we can have the winner decide whose terms we actually sign. It would have been for, in retrospect, it would have been for, like, one percent of the company or…”

“Founders only sell when they have no more concrete visions for the company. Definitive founders with robust plans don't sell.”

“When Yahoo offered to buy Facebook for a billion dollars in July, 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced, okay, guys, this is just a formality. It shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. We'…”

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

“There's no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.”

“Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.”

“A new company's most important strength is new thinking. Even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.”

“It is better to risk boldness than triviality. Number two, a bad plan is better than no plan. Number three, competitive markets destroy profits. Why you should be building a creative monopoly. And number four, sales matters just as much as products.”

“The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd, but to think for yourself.”

“The history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses, replacing incumbents.”

“All happy companies are different. Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same. They failed to escape competition.”

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

“If you're less sensitive to social cues, you're less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you. If you're interested in making things, you'll be less afraid to pursue those activities single-mindedly and thereby become incredibly good at them.”

“Every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.”

“Moving first is a tactic, not a goal. What really matters is generating cash flows in the future. So being the first mover doesn't do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It is much better to be the last mover. That is to make the last gre…”

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

“Your life is not a portfolio. An entrepreneur cannot diversify himself. So therefore you should focus relentlessly on something you're good at doing. But before that, you must think hard about whether it would be valuable in the future.”

“The most important things are singular. One market will probably be better than all others. One distribution strategy usually dominates all others too. Time and decision making themselves follow a power law, and some moments matter far more than others.”

“A conventional truth can be important, but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret.”

“People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. By definition, a secret hasn't been vetted by the mainstream. If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn't look for secrets.”

“Every great business is built around a secret that is hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world. When you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”

“He has this thing called Teal's law, which he says that a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.”

“This leads us to a second, less obvious understanding of the founding. It lasts as long as the company is creating new things and it ends when creation stops.”

“Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.”

“The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee's one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing.”

“The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those on the outside w…”

“Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not True.”

“Advertising doesn't exist to make you buy a product right away. It exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later.”

“Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business.”

“It's more powerful, but at the same time, more dangerous for a company to be led by a distinctive individual instead of an interchangeable manager.”

“The creation of new value cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.”

“If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme. We need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.”

“Founders are important, not because they're the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody else at his company.”

“I've never met anyone more tolerant, more open-minded. He gets such a bad rep for a lot of things, but he's just probably one of the most poorly understood people.”

“I don't think Reed or I Ever imagined how, I know none of us ever imagined how big this, Peter Thiel, all of us, we all sold our stock in Facebook, so we voted with our shares, you know, none of us could have ever described how big this all got.”

“Yeah, I think Peter Thiel in some sense is like, kind of hypocritical when he's like, don't go to college where he had Stanford undergrad, Stanford law school, he got all the badges, right?”

“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…”

“A lot of the reason that he originally did that deal was because most people wanted a much higher ownership percentage, and he was okay getting 10% of the company, which obviously was like clearly the right decision, and all you had to do is sort of adjust you…”

“In the Peter Thiel sense, it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product maker. You became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator. And so it can feel like a beat down that your path to innovation st…”

“I don't know if anybody knows about this, but Peter Thiel has a chess.com account with his real name, under which he's played over 50,000 games over the past 10 years.”

“There's a reason why Peter Thiel is the greatest venture capitalist in history, right?”

“Peter's usually pretty right on the macro things at the end of the day. Timing, timing does come into this stuff, and he's not always exactly right on timing, but at the end of the day, he's pretty good at being correct on, especially on, on macro Global macro…”

“The first round I raised, Was impossibly hard, and I got caught in between a fight, in a fight in between Peter Thiel and Sequoia, and he had just started Founders Fund, and Sequoia didn't like that, and they were mad at each other, and Peter had said, I'm gon…”

“I remember when I told Peter Thiel that he should invest in the company and Peter said, it's never going to be a big company. This vibe coding thing is sort of ridiculous. And he put it in an email”

“Every investor wants to go into big markets. I don't like big markets. Big markets have a lot of competition. Go into a small market and make it big.”

“If you've got a company that was like growing steadily, but then there's a big up round, it's probably the case that that up round is not even enough up. That if it's like a two X up round, maybe it should be a four X up.”

“Ultimately joining our board as one of very few boards that he's on was yeah, really appreciate that.”

“Unlike many bad business books, his is very good because he's built multiple companies, but when he wrote that, he was primarily drawing on the experience of building PayPal, which I think was formative for both of us, and what he wrote rings true to those of …”

“Max basically hired all the technical talent in the organization. Peter pretty much hired everybody else. They used their network primarily, so it was very difficult to get a job at PayPal unless you had a first degree or second degree connection to the engine…”

“The way he saw things, if investments were chosen based on voting, the Founders Fund portfolio would consist of middle-of-the-road startups to which nobody objected. Given that all the profits in venture come from a few improbable moonshots, this sort of conse…”

“Founders fund wired 2.3 million to deep mine and they assumed ownership of a bit less than half the company. There was no other capital available. This is December, 2010.”

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