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50 Best Peter Thiel Quotes for Startup Founders

50 Best Peter Thiel Quotes for Startup Founders

February 25, 2024

Peter Thiel cofounded PayPal, Palantir, and Founders Fund. He was also an early investor in Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, SpacEx, and Airbnb.

Here are 50 of Peter Thiel’s best quotes for startup founders:

“The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself… The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.” — Peter Thiel
“What’s preventing you from achieving your ten-year goals inside of six months?” — Peter Thiel
“Company culture doesn't exist apart from the company itself: no company has a culture; every company is a culture. A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.” — Peter Thiel
“Anyone who prefers owning a 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. Equity can’t create perfect incentives, but it’s the best way for a founder to keep everyone in the company broadly aligned.” — Peter Thiel
“Sequencing markets correctly is underrated, and it takes discipline to expand gradually. The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.” — Peter Thiel
“You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.” — Peter Thiel
“New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better.” — Peter Thiel
“If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.” — Peter Thiel
“Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other? Many seem to think it’s a sacrifice necessary for making money. But taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: it’s not even rational. Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your time well—even in purely financial terms.” — Peter Thiel
“As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.” — Peter Thiel
“It’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%.” — Peter Thiel
“People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it’s growing fast. The power law means that differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies. You could have 100% of the equity if you fully fund your own venture, but if it fails you’ll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable.” — Peter Thiel
“Humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology. Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do more with less, ratcheting up our fundamental capabilities to a higher level. Other animals are instinctively driven to build things like dams or honeycombs, but we are the only ones that can invent new things and better ways of making them. Humans don’t decide what to do by making choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world.” — Peter Thiel
“A mission-oriented business is one where you’re working on a problem where if you don’t work on it, nobody else in the world will. That tends to imbue things with a very deep sense of purpose.” — Peter Thiel
“For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. Those who succumb to measurement mania obsess about weekly active user statistics, monthly revenue targets, and quarterly earnings reports. However, you can hit those numbers and still overlook deeper, harder-to-measure problems that threaten the durability of your business.” — Peter Thiel
“A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.” — Peter Thiel
“Doing something different is what’s truly good for society—and it’s also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.” — Peter Thiel
“Even in engineering-driven Silicon Valley, the buzzwords of the moment call for building a “lean startup” that can “adapt” and “evolve” to an ever-changing environment. Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a “minimum viable product,” and iterate our way to success. But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.” — Peter Thiel
“When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.” — Peter Thiel
“Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.” — Peter Thiel
“War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war: allegedly necessary, supposedly valiant, but ultimately destructive.” — Peter Thiel
“If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme; we need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.” — Peter Thiel
“Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.” — Peter Thiel
“If you were a sociopathic boss who just wanted to create conflicts amongst your employees for no reason at all, the formula for creating conflicts is to tell two people to do the exact same thing.” — Peter Thiel
“All trends in technology are probably overrated. When you have something that can be reduced to a buzzword, it means that a lot of people are doing it and they’re somehow inadequately differentiated in that field.” — Peter Thiel
“Saying you want to be an entrepreneur is like saying you want to be rich or famous. It’s not good as a direct goal. If you have that as your sole goal, you’re unlikely to really succeed.” — Peter Thiel
“Disruption is one of the most horrible, overused buzzwords. I don’t think that your goal in starting a company should be to disrupt or destroy a big company. Your goal is to create a successful company.” — Peter Thiel
“Monopoly is the condition of every successful business. Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. 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.” — Peter Thiel
“From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, luck was something to be mastered, dominated, and controlled; everyone agreed that you should do what you could, not focus on what you couldn’t. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances… Strong men believe in cause and effect.” In 1912, after he became the first explorer to reach the South Pole, Roald Amundsen wrote: “Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck, people call it.” No one pretended that misfortune didn’t exist, but prior generations believed in making their own luck by working hard.” — Peter Thiel
“A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.” — Peter Thiel
“The best entrepreneurs know this: Every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.” — Peter Thiel
“The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.” — Peter Thiel
“The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all.” — Peter Thiel
“Distribution follows a power law of its own. This is counterintuitive for most entrepreneurs, who assume that more is more. But the kitchen sink approach—employ a few salespeople, place some magazine ads, and try to add some kind of viral functionality to the product as an afterthought—doesn’t work. Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.” — Peter Thiel
“Computers are complements for humans, not substitutes. The most valuable businesses for coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.” — Peter Thiel
“Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.” — Peter Thiel
“More than anything else, competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; and as a result, we trap ourselves within it—even though the more we compete, the less we gain.” — Peter Thiel
“Nerds might wish that distribution could be ignored and salesmen banished to another planet. All of us want to believe that we make up our own minds, that sales doesn’t work on us. But it’s not true. Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.” — Peter Thiel
“It’s always a big mistake going after a giant market on day 1. That’s typically evidence that you haven’t defined the categories correctly, and there’s going to be too much competition.” — Peter Thiel
“In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).” — Peter Thiel
“Creative monopoly means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.” — Peter Thiel
“Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it.” — Peter Thiel
“In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.” — Peter Thiel
“Hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary.” — Peter Thiel
“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these people, you aren’t learning from them.” — Peter Thiel
“Network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students—Mark Zuckerberg’s first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities.” — Peter Thiel
“Extreme optimism and extreme pessimism always converge on failure because extreme optimism tells you that there’s no need to work hard and extreme pessimism tells you that there’s no point in working hard. So they converge on not working hard, and they end up being this self-fulfilling thing.” — Peter Thiel
“The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.” — Peter Thiel
“If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.” — Peter Thiel
“A startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.” — Peter Thiel

50 Best Peter Thiel Quotes for Startup Founders

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