Peter Thiel Quotes
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When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.
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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?'
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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.
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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.'
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Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.
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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.
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If you're trying to develop a new drug, that costs you a billion dollars to get through the FDA. If you want to start a software company, you can get started with maybe $100,000.
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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.
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Airbnb is undervalued.
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There's always a sense that people will do things quite differently if they think they have privacy.
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Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people.
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We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.
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There's absolutely no bubble in technology.
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I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.
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People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.
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Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.
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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.
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Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like technology.
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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.