Peter Thiel on Business Quotes

"The most important strength of a new company is new thinking."

"If you can't be the best in the world at what you do, don't start."

"Vertical progress means doing things that have never been done. Horizontal progress means copying things that work."

"In a world of one-off games, you win by cheating. In a world of iterated games, you win by being reliable."

"Founders should be slightly strange, or even very strange."

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."

"A bad plan is better than no plan."

"The first step to building a great company is to find a secret."

"In a world of scarce resources, we need to do more with less."

"Monopoly is the condition of every successful business."

"Network effects can be powerful, but you’ll never reap them unless your product is valuable to its very first users."

"Definite optimism works when you build the future you envision."

"As an investor, I look for a company that has the potential to capture a large share of a small market."

"You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future."

"The best entrepreneurs are not risk-takers. They are risk-mitigators."

"Proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension."

"The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine."

"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."

"The most successful companies make the progress of humanity look like a straight line."

"The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself."

"The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined."

"Indefinite optimism is the belief that the future will be better, but we don't know how."

"Competition is for losers."

"A company is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future."

"Technology is a miracle because it allows us to do more with less."

"Sales is hidden. If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business."

"Customers won't care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way."

"There are no secrets about the natural world anymore. The only secrets left are the ones about people."

"A great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future."

"If you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business."

"Branding is a powerful way to create a monopoly, but it’s also a dangerous way."

"The power law is the most important thing to understand in venture capital."

"If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough."