Peter Thiel is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, philanthropist, political activist, and author.He is member of PayPal Mafia. But besides being an outstanding entrepreneur and investor, Peter Thielis also an acclaimed author and a political activist who has also established a fellowship programme that encourages students to skip college and pursue their business dreams. His celebrated book, Zero to One, is considered to make anyone feel like a superhuman, and judging by his credentials, he’s bound to have some interesting things to say about entrepreneurship, business and Startup.
Let’s take a look at a few.
“If you’re a startup, you want to get to a monopoly”.
“Anyone that has a monopoly will pretend that they’re in incredible competition”.
“There are exactly 2 kinds of businesses in this world. Businesses that are perfectly competitive and businesses that are monopolies.”
"Many entrepreneurs focus only on short term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t.”
“It’s a really good time to be an entrepreneur. If you have a halfway decent idea, you can get it completely funded.”
“Entrepreneurship: you put one dumb foot in front of the other while the world throws bricks at your head.”
“As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.”
“If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.”
“In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything.”
“Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.”
“Selling your company to the media is a necessary part of selling it to everyone.”
“Every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.”
“You can achieve your 10-year plan in the next six months.”
“Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”
"Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create."
“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.”
“It’s true that every great entrepreneur is first and foremost a designer.”
“The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places.”
“Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.”
"My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing."
"Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future."
"I don't think success is complicated; if you do something that works, then it's a success."
"The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them."
"The thing that’s always a big mistake is going after a giant market on Day 1”
"Almost all successful companies in Silicon Valley had some model of starting with small markets and expanding.”
"You want to be a 1 of a kind company, where it’s the only one in a small ecosystem.”
“Go after small markets, often markets that are so small that people don’t even notice them, they don’t think they make sense.”
“All unhappy companies are alike, because they fail to escape the essential sameness which is competition”
"The thing about network effects is that they are often very hard to get started.”
“The critical thing about these monopolies is, it’s not enough to have a monopoly for just a moment.”
“I always think in some ways, the better framing is you want to be the last mover. You want to be the last company in a category”
“I think that when lots of people are trying to do something, that is often proof of insanity.”
“Don’t always go through the tiny little door that everyone is trying to rush through”
