Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.
— Peter Thiel
Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.
All of us have to work toward a definite future... that can motivate and inspire people to change the world.
You become a great writer by writing.
I spend an awful lot of time just thinking about what is going on in the world and talking to people about that. It's probably one of my default social activities, just getting dinners with friends.
An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role.
College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.
The future is limitless.
We protect monopolies with copyright.
I would not describe myself as a super early adopter of consumer technology.
I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.
Great things happen only once.
I think what's always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth.
One of my friends started a company in 1997, seven years before Facebook, called SocialNet. And they had all these ideas, and you could be, like, a cat, and I'd be a dog on the Internet, and we'd have this virtual reality, and we would just not be ourselves. That didn't work because reality always works better than any fake version of it.
I had a good experience in college, but I don't think interdisciplinary education is something that's stressed very much at all. It's generally considered to be something of a bad idea.
I think competition can make people stronger at whatever it is they're competing on. If we're competing in some athletic event for competitive swimmers, really intensely competing, it's likely that both of us will become better, but it's also quite possible we'll lose sight of what's truly valuable.
Every time you write an email, it is in the public domain. There are all these ways where security is not as good as people believe.
Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits.
Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like technology.
The model of the U.S. economy is that we are the country that does new things.
Credentials are critical if you want to do something professional. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or professor, there is a credentialing process. But there are a lot of other things where it's not clear they're that important.
If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done.
When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me - from high school to college to law school to professional life.
Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there's so much we can be doing with oceans, and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned.
Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?
You don't want to just do 'me too' companies that are copying what others are doing.
I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones.
We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.
The core problem in our society is political correctness.
I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.
Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people.
From my perspective, I think the question of how we build a better future is an extremely important overarching question, and I think it's become obscured from us because we no longer think it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about the future.
I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.
There's always a sense that people will do things quite differently if they think they have privacy.
'Perfect competition' is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So-called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand.
The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present - and that's not fully valued.
If the whole U.S. was like Silicon Valley, we'd be in good shape. But now, the entire U.S. is not driven by technology, is not driven by innovation.
I believe that people are too complacent about technology.
How to teach people to do what hasn't been done is a great riddle.
There's absolutely no bubble in technology.
If you do something new, it will always look a little bit strange.
What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?
A diploma is a dunce hat in disguise.
I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.
Don't bother starting the 10,000th restaurant in Manhattan. Find something to do that if you don't do it, it won't get done.
I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.
I did not want to write just another business book.
Technology just means information technology.
If you have a business idea that's extremely easy to copy, that can often become something of a challenge or problem.
In Silicon Valley, I point out that many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger's where it's like you're missing the imitation, socialization gene.
