If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth. Peter Thiel More Quotes by Peter Thiel More Quotes From Peter Thiel Anyone who prefers owning part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company's value in the future. Peter Thiel cash long commitment A lot of the key to Apple's succes is Designing technology in order to hide it. Peter Thiel technology keys order If you invest in Microsoft or Oracle, or a number of other companies for that matter, you're fundamentally making a bet that there's going to be no innovation. So an investment in Microsoft is a bet that the operating system is going to stay the same, it won't be replaced by Linux, Google Docs, or a mobile platform like iOS or Android. Peter Thiel google investment innovation I think we have a bubble in the US in government bonds, because of the quantitative easing and the negative real interest rates, and to some extent, that increases asset values across the board, including in startups. Peter Thiel real negative thinking The something of somewhere is mostly just the nothing of nowhere. Peter Thiel We need more pessimism that the future might be a lot worse, and we need more optimism that the future might be better. Peter Thiel optimism might needs There's been a lot companies that have shown "zero to one" kind of growth in the computer, internet software age. Facebook and Google are zero to one companies. Apple's iPhone was the first smartphone that really works, and of course, then you scale it horizontally, but the vertical component was really critical. Space X would also be one. Peter Thiel google growth age If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people. Peter Thiel pay people thinking Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation. Peter Thiel salvation church kind I'm skeptical of a lot of what falls under the rubric of education.... People are on these tracks. They are getting these credentials and it's very unclear how viable they are in many cases. Peter Thiel track people fall As an investor-entrepreneur, I’ve always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking. Peter Thiel entrepreneur opportunity people Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista. Peter Thiel optimistic photography player Great tech opportunities happen only once. Peter Thiel happens opportunity There are many more secrets in the world that are waiting to be found. The question of how many secrets exist in our world is roughly equivalent to how many startups people should start. Peter Thiel our-world waiting people It's a horribly mismanaged company-probably a lot of pot smoking going on there. Peter Thiel company smoking pot But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future. Peter Thiel powerful school thinking I'm always very excited about trying to do something on next-generation biotechnology and life sciences because I think if we can cure cancer or dementia, we can really make the future a lot better and I think these things are eminently doable. Peter Thiel cancer trying thinking Society is secretly driven by sales Peter Thiel driven Google makes so much money that it’s now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined. Peter Thiel three-times google three A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Peter Thiel bubbles
