Peter Thiel

“Time exists on this massive power law basis... There could be an hour that comes in your life that is worth more than the cumulative sum of everything else you've spent all of the time, all of the effort, all of the energy that you've spent doing everything el…”

“Peter Thiel basically employed this Three lawyers, big shot lawyers, and they're, and basically when he was outed as gay by Gawker, he employed, and this is a great book by Ryan holiday. I forget what it's called, but he employed these three lawyers and I forg…”

“He steel mans both sides of the argument and then he decides which one he believes is the correct one.”

“He has pretty much zero interest in small talk. He will, he's looking for original thinkers. So I'll ask you a question and then he'll hear you. And it's sort of like, if you're just saying the same shit that everybody says, very heard, like thinking, I think …”

“The problem is if you're the kind of person who it's like, I'm going to spend 10 years chasing down this media outlet when everyone is telling me not to do that. You're also the kind of person who can get sucked into other things that I think are going to pay …”

“Peter Thiel has the same thing he used to do at running PayPal famously. It's like, was Peter Thiel a good manager? And people are like, no, like, managerial skills or like soft skills are not what Peter Thiel is known for, but he did one really effective tact…”

“If you use Warren Buffett's rule, you could never be Peter Thiel. If you use Peter Thiel's rules, you could never be Warren Buffett, right? Like, you know, these are, they're different games and you have to know the rules of that game in order to play it.”

“What he did is he bought his founder shares at PayPal with his Roth IRA. So he spent like 2000 dollars to buy PayPal shares that became worth twenty seven million dollars when PayPal sold. And then he had twenty seven million dollars to just make all kinds of …”

“Top, top flight university, universities are part luxury brand, Part daycare, part education, part insurance policy.”

“One of the lessons I learned from Peter Thiel is that you should be really, really careful putting effort into new things. Almost always, it's a better idea to put money into your main compounding thing. That's got a lot more room to run. Like there's more are…”

“Usually there's like one reason that dominates everything else. And that's just the nature of the world is that when something's successful, It's kind of like the power law rule, right? Like in a venture capital, like fund, even there tends to be one thing tha…”

“And you're like, literally personally have like a few million dollars riding on it at a time as early my twenties. These guys, you know, Peter probably had a hundred million dollars riding on it every time.”

“A lot of startups, when you're getting going, you want to like, you get really excited about some partnership on the table and you think it's going to really help you. But a lot of partnerships will cap your upside. A lot of partnerships will limit your abilit…”

“I'd much rather hire for talent and ambition and hard work than hire for expertise. So almost, and there's exceptions, right? So if you have a company that's already really working and already really scaling, and there's like a machine that has to be run, you …”

“And so we actually convinced him to pretend to be CEO for a few years. So that Peter would stop trying to hire like a really like senior, like military guy, but then he was such a good CEO. Then he actually was, he's still CEO, 20 years later.”

“We want to bet on negative one to zero. Like Peter Thiel talked about the zero to one companies. It's like, we still one step even before that. Like you're at negative one, you're wandering the forest, you need a place to tinker and like come and get the ideas…”

“Peter Thiel, who's like the savantiest of savants, has said, like, there's this fifth tentpole of this equation, which is called brand, and he goes, I don't understand brand, though. But like, I don't exist, but I don't understand it”

“He put his PayPal founder shares in a Roth IRA. Sold those for about twenty seven million dollars, then used this as a supercharged investment account to where it is today, where he has five billion dollars in his Roth.”

“He turns, he retires next year, so he gets all of that with no taxes.”

“The only time I've ever encountered Peter, Peter Thiel was on the opportunity to invest in Replit. We were both going for the opportunity. And I think when you go against somebody like Peter Thiel you plan to lose in most cases. And I didn't end up losing the …”

“Thiel backs, Thiel becomes the first backer of DeepMind.”

“The second backer, I think, the second significant backer was Elon Musk. So Thiel tells Elon about this. Elon meets Demis. Demis says that, that big dog line of basically like, I'm working on the most important thing in the world. Elon, you know, is like, wait…”

“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…”

“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.”