378 Quotes by Peter Thiel

For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. Those who succumb to measurement mania obsess about weekly active user statistics, monthly revenue targets, and quarterly earnings reports. However, you can hit those numbers and still overlook deeper, harder-to-measure problems that threaten the durability of your business.

I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it’s something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn’t compute with our existing educational system.

Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.

I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years – part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.

The convergence of desire is even more obvious at the top: all oligarchs have the same taste in Cristal, from Petersburg to Pyongyang.

A lot of the key to Apple’s succes is Designing technology in order to hide it.

So you might ask: are there any fields that matter but haven’t been standardized and institutionalized?

If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right – dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in – is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.

If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.