378 Quotes by Peter Thiel

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 that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.

In the developed world, technological progress means that you can have a situation where there’s growth, where there’s a way in which everybody can be better off over time.

If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business – no.

War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war: allegedly necessary, supposedly valiant, but ultimately destructive.

In the ’30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That’s not going to work today.

A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun.

Today our challenge is to both imagine and create the new technologies that can make the 21st century more peaceful and prosperous than the 20th.

In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work.

Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see.