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
How to teach people to do what hasn't been done is a great riddle.
College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.
I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.
I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute.
Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.
Don't bother starting the 10,000th restaurant in Manhattan. Find something to do that if you don't do it, it won't get done.
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.
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.
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.
The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.
Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?
The millennial generation in the US is the first that has reduced expectations from those of their parents. And I think there is something decadent and declinist about that.
The developing world can just do things that are extensive or horizontal, that basically copy. The developed world needs to do things that are intensive or vertical, where we take our civilization to the next level.
I'm in favor of free trade, but I think if you had to make a choice between having technological progress versus free trade, you had one or the other, you should always pick technological progress. I think it's an incredibly important variable for creating more prosperity.