If the whole U.S. was like Silicon Valley, we’d be in good shape. But now, the entire U.S. is not driven by technology, is not driven by innovation. – Peter Thiel
Technologies like PayPal foster competition because they enable people to shift their funds from one jurisdiction to another, and I think that ultimately will lead to a world in which there’s less government power and therefore more individual control. – Peter Thiel
There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don’t think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, ‘The City and the Stars.’ It’s set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out. – Peter Thiel
In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem. – Peter Thiel
When parents have invested enormous amounts of money in their kids’ education, to find their kids coming back to live with them – well, that was not what they bargained for. – Peter Thiel
Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone. – Peter Thiel
Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don’t like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people’s couches. – Peter Thiel
Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away. – Peter Thiel
A conventional truth can be important – it’s essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example – but it won’t give you an edge. It’s not a secret. – Peter Thiel
Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition? – Peter Thiel
The optimism that many felt in the 1960s over labour-saving technology is giving way to a fearful question: ‘Will your labour be good for anything in the future? Or will you be replaced by a machine?’ – Peter Thiel
The first question we would ask if aliens landed on this planet is not, ‘What does this mean for the economy or jobs?’ It would be, ‘Are they friendly or unfriendly?’ – Peter Thiel
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. – Peter Thiel
Every time you write an email, it is in the public domain. There are all these ways where security is not as good as people believe. – Peter Thiel
When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me – from high school to college to law school to professional life. – Peter Thiel
I don’t think success is complicated; if you do something that works, then it’s a success. – Peter Thiel
Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human. – Peter Thiel
The big challenge with Internet financial services has been that it’s very difficult to get large numbers of customers to sign up for your service. – Peter Thiel
There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry’s having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising. – Peter Thiel
As an undergraduate at Stanford, I started ‘The Stanford Review,’ which ended up being very engaged in the hot debates of the time: campus speech codes, questions about diversity on campus, all sorts of debates like that. – Peter Thiel
It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they’ve made their peace with death. – Peter Thiel
If you have a business idea that’s extremely easy to copy, that can often become something of a challenge or problem. – Peter Thiel
When people use the word ‘science,’ it’s often a tell, like in poker, that you’re bluffing. – Peter Thiel
Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. – Peter Thiel
My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing. – Peter Thiel
‘Perfect competition’ is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So-called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand. – Peter Thiel
