Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel
Peter Andreas Thielis a German-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and hedge fund manager. Thiel co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin and Elon Musk and served as its CEO. He also co-founded Palantir, of which he is chairman. He was the first outside investor in Facebook, the popular social-networking site, with a 10.2% stake acquired in 2004 for $500,000, and sits on the company's board of directors...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth11 October 1967
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?
The core problem in our society is political correctness.
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.
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.
Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.
I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations.
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.
Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
I think it's always good for gay people to come out, but it's also understandable why people might choose not to do so.
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.
I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.
There's always a sense that people will do things quite differently if they think they have privacy.