378 Quotes by Peter Thiel

Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody – and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.

But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism.

Winning is better than losing, but everybody loses when the war isn’t one worth fighting.

The hazards of imitative competition may partially explain why individuals with an Asperger’s-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today. If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.

Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth.

No company has a culture, every company is a culture.

It is sort of a bit of a caricature of capitalism, that it’s always this zero-sum game where you have winners and losers. Silicon Valley, the technology industry at its best, creates a situation where everybody can be a winner.

Whoever is first to dominate the most important segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole market.

Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people.