I had a good experience in college, but I don’t think interdisciplinary education is something that’s stressed very much at all. It’s generally considered to be something of a bad idea. – Peter Thiel
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. – Peter Thiel
The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won’t start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won’t start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them. – Peter Thiel
Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there’s so much we can be doing with oceans, and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned. – Peter Thiel
Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions ‘When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?’ A bad answer is, ‘We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.’ – Peter Thiel
Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits. – Peter Thiel
An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role. – Peter Thiel
Spiraling demand for resources of which our world contains a finite supply is the great long-term threat posed by globalisation. That is why we need new technology to relieve it. – Peter Thiel
All of us have to work toward a definite future… that can motivate and inspire people to change the world. – Peter Thiel
I spend an awful lot of time just thinking about what is going on in the world and talking to people about that. It’s probably one of my default social activities, just getting dinners with friends. – Peter Thiel
If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn’t create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake. – Peter Thiel
Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. – Peter Thiel
I think competition can make people stronger at whatever it is they’re competing on. If we’re competing in some athletic event for competitive swimmers, really intensely competing, it’s likely that both of us will become better, but it’s also quite possible we’ll lose sight of what’s truly valuable. – Peter Thiel
I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society. – Peter Thiel
I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute. – Peter Thiel
In Silicon Valley, I point out that many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger’s where it’s like you’re missing the imitation, socialization gene. – Peter Thiel
I’m very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries. – Peter Thiel
The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that’s very different from the present – and that’s not fully valued. – Peter Thiel
I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically. – Peter Thiel
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. – Peter Thiel
I think it’s a problem that we don’t have more companies like Facebook. It shouldn’t be the only company that’s doing this well. – Peter Thiel
One of my friends started a company in 1997, seven years before Facebook, called SocialNet. And they had all these ideas, and you could be, like, a cat, and I’d be a dog on the Internet, and we’d have this virtual reality, and we would just not be ourselves. That didn’t work because reality always works better than any fake version of it. – Peter Thiel
