378 Quotes by 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.

University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it’s not a consumption decision, it’s an investment decision. Actually, no, it’s a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties.

Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.

That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.

Jobs’s 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.

Everybody has a product to sell – no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.

I’m in favor of free trade, but I think if you had to make a choice between having technological progress versus free trade, you had one or the other, you should always pick technological progress. I think it’s an incredibly important variable for creating more prosperity.

The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.

If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don’t, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there’s no progress and basically everybody’s gain is somebody else’s loss.