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
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.
When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.
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.
Monopolies are bad and deserve their reputation when things are static and the monopolies function as toll collectors... But I think they're quite positive when they're dynamic and do something new.
My hope is that we're going to end up with a far more tolerant society, where the erosion of privacy, to the extent it erodes, will be offset by increased tolerance.
'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.
One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar.
Distribution may not matter in fictional worlds, but it matters in most. 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 this happen, and it's harder than it looks.
Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.
There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley.
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.
People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.
Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.
Credentials are critical if you want to do something professional. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or professor, there is a credentialing process. But there are a lot of other things where it's not clear they're that important.