By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready-for nothing in particular. Peter Thiel More Quotes by Peter Thiel More Quotes From Peter Thiel I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures. Peter Thiel horizon long thinking If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don't, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there's no progress and basically everybody's gain is somebody else's loss. Peter Thiel zero loss hands I think markets are often not thinking on a long-time horizon, I think that our government structurally is doing even less so. When we have a government where we have people who are up for election at most once every six years for a U.S. senator, that's a time horizon that is much shorter than in a market that a company is looking at 10, 15, 20 years which is a time horizon over which a stock price is typically valued. Peter Thiel government years thinking What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy. Peter Thiel nerd hard-work missing In the developed world, technological progress means that you can have a situation where there's growth, where there's a way in which everybody can be better off over time. Peter Thiel progress growth mean I think somehow people should be encouraged to think about a very long time horizon and I think this is true for businesses, it's true for governments and it's true for people doing things in the non-profit sector. Peter Thiel government long thinking The zero-sum world [the movie The Social Network] portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood. Peter Thiel valleys hollywood zero My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. Peter Thiel technology people thinking I do think Tim Cook is doing a very good job, I think he has almost impossibly big shoes to fill with Steve Jobs' departure. And so, that's the context always someone has to put things in. But, I do think that for the most part that Apple is at a point where it's much more focused on scale than on doing new things. Peter Thiel good-job very-good thinking For a new payment product, you always have to ask, how much better is it than the current solution? So when we started Paypal, for eBay micro merchants, it was much better than getting the 7 to 10 days process of cashing a check in the mail. When you look at stores or physical worlds, places, a lot of these places are already set up to take cash or credit card. Apple Pay may be an incremental improvement, maybe a little bit better. But when you have something that's pretty good and you go to something that's perfect, sometimes it's very hard to drive adoption because the delta is not that big. Peter Thiel adoption perfect world The college kids should think hard about what they're doing. If you have a great idea for a company, there's no right time to start it, and it's often better to start it sooner rather than later. I went to Stanford undergrad and Stanford Law School, and if I had to do it over again, I might still do those things, but I wish I had asked the type of questions like, why I was doing it, was it just for the status and prestige, or was it because I was really interested in the substance of it. Peter Thiel college kids school When you already have $150 billion a year in revenues from the iPhone, it's very hard to come up with any new vertical that will sort of move the dial. And there's this sort of weird effect where the larger a company gets, the harder it is to come up with any new product that really moves the dial. Peter Thiel moving I think China thinks information technology is less important than we think it is in the US, economically, and more important politically. And so Chinese internet companies are extremely political, they're protected behind the great firewall of China, and investment in Alibaba is good as long as Jack Ma stays in the good graces of the Chinese communist party. Alibaba is largely copying various business models from the US; they have combined some things in interesting new ways, but I think it's fundamentally a business that works because of the political protection you get in China. Peter Thiel technology party thinking Now it’s either about technology that doesn’t work or about technology that’s used in bad ways. The anthology of the top twenty-five sci-fi stories in 1970 was, like, ‘Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon,’ and in 2008 it was, like, ‘The galaxy is run by a fundamentalist Islamic confederacy, and there are people who are hunting planets and killing them for fun.’ Peter Thiel islamic running fun Our economy is broken. I'm not a politician, but neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America. Peter Thiel economy politician broken It's good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work. Peter Thiel good you work success Technology just means information technology. Peter Thiel means just information technology 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. Peter Thiel networking internet real people If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done. Peter Thiel nobody you experience long Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth. Peter Thiel street against always growth
