Peter Thiel

“When someone says, what are you excited about? It's because they don't know what to be excited about themselves. And so they're fishing you to try to get excited about something because they lack it in their lives. And so they're doing, they're outsourcing the…”

“Some of our earliest investors were people like Justin Mateen, founder of Tinder, Justin Khan, founder of Twitch Peter Thiel, and then we had our first series A raised led by Insight, and then Lately our Series B was led by A-Star and Kevin Hartz, founder of E…”

“So we raised our first fund 10 years ago. Peter was our anchor check actually. That was a twenty million dollar fund.”

“At one point, even with the fellowship, like we went from, okay, it's not a startup program. And we can have researchers and nonprofit people and startup people. So like a few years later, he's like, well, maybe we should be a startup program.”

“There was no team. I mean, there was Jonathan Cain, who was the president of the foundation, Jim O'Neill, who is, is now at HHS. He was on the board of the foundation Michael Gibson. That was his first day of work actually. And he wasn't expecting to be there …”

“Jim and Peter and Luke Nozick had flown back on a plane from New York. This was right before the Sarah Lacy interview the next morning, actually. And I think they sort of brainstormed this number of 20 people, and then the idea of, like, 20 under 20”

“What's wonderful about the fellowship is that people talk about the cost of higher ed now and the education bubble and the crazy inflation that it's outpaced without ever mentioning Peter. Like people have forgotten that he's actually the one who started that …”

“Every successful company is a cult. And what a cult really means is you have a view about the world that's different than other normal people. And you're right to be successful. Like a cult doesn't have to be right, but the startup is a cult. That's right. And…”

“We gave venture returns, not just venture returns. We gave venture returns as if you're like, you know, I don't know, you're like Peter Thiel, Sequoia, Coastal returns. To the average person who is willing to do their own work and stand up against kind of trie…”

“Concentration and venture is a really important one. This is like the idea that you don't want to have a thousand investments in a billion dollar fund. You want to have like a massive amount of concentration in the top few positions in that fund. That's someth…”

“It really does not make sense or would not have made sense for Andrel in 2017 to go and compete in these highly, you know, crowded marketplaces. We went and targeted an area where there were no venture backed players at all. And that gave us an incredible head…”

“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 …”

“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…”

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”