Peter Thiel Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

Distribution may not matter in fictional worlds, but it matters in most. The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make this happen, and it's harder than it looks.

Peter Thiel
Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

Peter Thiel
If they don't go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers.

Peter Thiel
Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.

Peter Thiel
If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.

Peter Thiel
Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. No matter how strong your product-even if it easily fits into already established habits and anybody who tries it likes it immediately-you must still support it with a strong distribution plan.

Peter Thiel
The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.

Peter Thiel
There's a wide range of sales ability: there are many gradations between novices, experts, and masters. There are even sales grandmasters. If you don't know any grandmasters, it's not because you haven't encountered them, but rather because their art is hidden in plain sight.

Peter Thiel
The road doesn't have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.

Peter Thiel
If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now?

Peter Thiel
What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.

Peter Thiel
Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.

Peter Thiel
As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don't disrupt: Avoid competition as much as possible.

Peter Thiel
First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.

Peter Thiel
The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.

Peter Thiel
In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).

Peter Thiel
By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready-for nothing in particular.

Peter Thiel
Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.

Peter Thiel
In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

Peter Thiel
My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.

Peter Thiel
You'll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it's important in general, but why you're doing something important that no one else is going to get done.

Peter Thiel
We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.

Peter Thiel
For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don't matter.

Peter Thiel
Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.

Peter Thiel
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.

Peter Thiel
Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Peter Thiel
The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.

Peter Thiel
Google makes so much money that it's now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined.

Peter Thiel
Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.

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

Peter Thiel