Peter Thiel on Wealth Quotes

"The history of progress is a history of better and better monopolies replacing those that came before."

"If you want to be wealthy, you must be willing to take risks and to fail."

"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."

"In a world of short-termism, the long-term view is a competitive advantage."

"Monopoly is the condition of every successful business."

"If your goal is to never make a mistake in your voice, you shouldn't say much of anything."

"The best way to predict the future is to create it."

"A business creates at least as much value as it captures."

"Proprietary technology is the most substantive advantage a company can have because it makes your product difficult or impossible to replicate."

"The best way to invest is to find a company that is doing something that no one else is doing."

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

"All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition."

"The only way to achieve extraordinary results is to do something extraordinary."

"To create value, you need to find a secret. A secret is something that is true, but that very few people agree with you on."

"The most successful entrepreneurs are those who are able to identify and exploit market inefficiencies."

"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."

"The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than make them obsolete."

"The value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future."

"The power law is the most important concept in venture capital and in life."

"The lessons of history are not that we should avoid risk, but that we should avoid the crowd."

"The entrepreneur's challenge is to build a company that is both profitable and sustainable over the long term."

"Wealth is not a zero-sum game. When one person creates value, everyone benefits."

"A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn’t have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products, and its impact on the wider world."

"Even in a world of zero-sum competition, you can still create wealth by being more efficient than your competitors."

"Vertical progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done."

"In a world of indefinite optimism, people prefer a portfolio of options over a single definite plan."

"Money is either an end in itself, or it is a means to an end. But in a world of indefinite optimism, it is the only thing that is real."

"If you are the 100th person to start a restaurant in Palo Alto, you are not going to make any money."

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

"The future of wealth is in the hands of those who can see what others cannot."

"In a world of scarce resources, the only way to create wealth is to do more with less."

"Proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage."

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