Latest Peter Thiel Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

• 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

  Party, Thinking, Technology

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

• 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

  School, Kids, College

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

• 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, Innovation, Investment

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

• 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

  Thinking, Good Job, Very Good

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

• 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, Thinking, Negative

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

• 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

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

• 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

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

• 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

  Perfect, Adoption, World

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

• 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

  Broken, Politician, Economy

  Source: www.pbs.org

• It is sort of a bit of a caricature of capitalism, that it's always this zero-sum game where you have winners and losers. Silicon Valley, the technology industry at its best, creates a situation where everybody can be a winner.

  Peter Thiel

  Zero, Technology, Games

  Interview with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.

• The idea of becoming an entrepreneur is something that is not taught very well in school and is something that people should try to do earlier on.

  Peter Thiel

  School, Ideas, People

  Interview with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.

• Education needs to be rethought. Education does not just happen in college, but it also happens in developing skills which will enable people to contribute to our society as a whole.

  Peter Thiel

  College, Skills, People

  Source: bigthink.com

• In the U.S., we fundamentally need to do new things, which I think is harder for the government to do. And moreover, it is not something our government actually is inclined to particularly do.

  Peter Thiel

  Thinking, Government, Needs

  Interview with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.

• American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things; lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future.

  Peter Thiel

  Rights, Government, Building Things

  Source: bigthink.com

• One of the reasons I think people are increasingly nervous about U.S. debt is because they think that we are not actually digging ourselves out of the hole, but instead are digging ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole and will not be able to pay it back because we're not actually creating the new technologies that will enable us to pay back and the money somehow is not really being invested in the future or in progress.

  Peter Thiel

  Technology, Thinking, Creating

  Source: bigthink.com

• The debt austerity would not be problems if we had technological progress. If you doubled the debt in the U.S., and the size of the economy doubled because of technological progress and growth, the two would roughly cancel out and it would all be a totally manageable situation.

  Peter Thiel

  Two, Growth, Progress

  Interviewed with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.

• If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future.

  Peter Thiel

  Optimistic, Technology, People

  Interviewed with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.

• The developing world can just do things that are extensive or horizontal, that basically copy. The developed world needs to do things that are intensive or vertical, where we take our civilization to the next level.

  Peter Thiel

  Civilization, Needs, Next Level

  Interview with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.

• Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.

  Peter Thiel

  Country, Technology, Thinking

  Source: bigthink.com

• I'm in favor of free trade, but I think if you had to make a choice between having technological progress versus free trade, you had one or the other, you should always pick technological progress. I think it's an incredibly important variable for creating more prosperity.

  Peter Thiel

  Thinking, Creating, Choices

  Interviewed with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.

• 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

  Mean, Growth, Progress

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Interviewed with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.

• Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.

  Peter Thiel

  Technology, Thinking, Progress

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Thinking, Government, Long

  Interviewed with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.