Peter Thiel

“Defining roles reduce conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities.”

“PayPal was at the time the only email based payments company in the world. We employed fewer people than all the restaurants did, but our business was much more valuable than all of those restaurants combined.”

“Most of a tech company's value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.”

“Which is, a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.”

“And Peter Thiel says recruiting is a core competency. It should never be outsourced.”

“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 outside have mis…”

“The engineer's grail is a product great enough to quote, sell itself, but anyone who would actually say this about a real product must be lying. Either he's delusional, which means he's lying to himself, or he's selling something and thereby, thereby contradic…”

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

“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is an even shorter supply than genius.”

“Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. 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.”

“The most important things are singular. One market will probably be better than all others. One distribution strategy usually dominates all others too.”

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

“Venture returns do not follow a normal distribution. They follow a power law. A small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that, that can become overwhe…”

“Founders only sell when they have no more concrete visions for the company. Definitive founders with robust plans don't sell, which means the offer wasn't high enough.”

“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.”

“A unique founder can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades. Paradoxically, in personal bureaucracies staffed by trained professionals can last longer than any lifetime, but they usually act with short time ho…”

“A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definitive mastery. Definitive mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world.”

“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.”

“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'r…”

“Jobs' return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business The creation of new value cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.”

“One of my favorite quotes that I've ever heard Peter Thiel say is he says, most people systematically undervalue their time.”

“The problem, a lot of technology company entrepreneurs is they optimize for growth at the expense of durability. But if you actually look at when these companies make the most money, it's like 10, 20, 30 years into the future. So that takeaway was like, you do…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

“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…”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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'…”

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