Famous quotes by Peter Thiel:
"Hubris is an issue at every one of these Silicon Valley companies that are successful. I don't know if it's any worse at Google than it's been at other highly successful technology companies."
"[In the book's first chapter, Jackson recalls a speech Thiel gave to Confinnity employees, just a few days after he began work, in which he described his hopes for PayPal to become a borderless private currency. He saw PayPal facilitating trade in currency for anyone with an Internet connection by enabling an instant transfer of funds from insecure currencies to more stable ones, such as U.S. dollars. Thiel explained to his young staff how governments had historically robbed their own citizens through inflation and currency devaluation. The very rich could always protect themselves by investing offshore. It's the poor and middle class, Thiel explained, who get screwed.] PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before, ... It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure."
"It's a really good time to be an entrepreneur. If you have a halfway decent idea, you can get it completely funded."
"I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it's something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn't compute with our existing educational system."
"People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why."
"In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today."
"Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone."
"In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem."
"I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years - part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion."
"I think it's a problem that we don't have more companies like Facebook. It shouldn't be the only company that's doing this well."