When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?
— Peter Thiel
I'm not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.
You will never build a company on the scale of a Facebook or a Google if you sell it along the way.
Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
The optimism that many felt in the 1960s over labour-saving technology is giving way to a fearful question: 'Will your labour be good for anything in the future? Or will you be replaced by a machine?'
The big challenge with Internet financial services has been that it's very difficult to get large numbers of customers to sign up for your service.
I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute.
The first question we would ask if aliens landed on this planet is not, 'What does this mean for the economy or jobs?' It would be, 'Are they friendly or unfriendly?'
Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.
As an undergraduate at Stanford, I started 'The Stanford Review,' which ended up being very engaged in the hot debates of the time: campus speech codes, questions about diversity on campus, all sorts of debates like that.
I don't think success is complicated; if you do something that works, then it's a success.
Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions 'When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?' A bad answer is, 'We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.'
I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.
You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.
Monopolies are bad and deserve their reputation when things are static and the monopolies function as toll collectors... But I think they're quite positive when they're dynamic and do something new.
There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry's having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising.
Airbnb is undervalued.
Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.
I think it's always good for gay people to come out, but it's also understandable why people might choose not to do so.
There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley.
Spiraling demand for resources of which our world contains a finite supply is the great long-term threat posed by globalisation. That is why we need new technology to relieve it.
Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.
There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.
I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.
People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.
Technologies like PayPal foster competition because they enable people to shift their funds from one jurisdiction to another, and I think that ultimately will lead to a world in which there's less government power and therefore more individual control.
I would consider myself a rather staunch libertarian.
One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar.
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.
When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.
Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.
I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations.
If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn't create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake.
Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don't like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people's couches.
When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the Internet. The Apollo program was just about to put a man on the moon - and it was Neil Armstrong, from right here in Ohio. The future felt limitless. But today, our government is broken.
Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.
The best start-ups 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 start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.
Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.
My hope is that we're going to end up with a far more tolerant society, where the erosion of privacy, to the extent it erodes, will be offset by increased tolerance.
I suspect if people live a lot longer they would be retired for a somewhat longer period of time. Just the financial planning takes on a very different character.
Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'
Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.
I worked at a law firm in New York very briefly.
It's good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work.
Unsolved problems are where you'll find opportunity. Energy is one sector with extremely urgent unsolved problems.
If you're trying to develop a new drug, that costs you a billion dollars to get through the FDA. If you want to start a software company, you can get started with maybe $100,000.
Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable.
A conventional truth can be important - it's essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example - but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret.
When parents have invested enormous amounts of money in their kids' education, to find their kids coming back to live with them - well, that was not what they bargained for.
Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced, and there must be an intense belief in it.
