Peter Thiel Quotes

Competition is. In every business, no matter how small or how large, someone is just around the corner forever trying to steal your ideas and build his success out of your imagination, struggling after that which you have toiled endless years to secure, striving to outdo you in each and every way. If such a competitor would work as hard to originate as he does to copy, he would much more quickly gain success.

Competition is good and has served us well.

As with Google, Facebook was a place that just concentrated a lot of top talent. It's just sort of natural that those people would go on and continue to be successful.

The problem with Myspace was always that it was never as strong a product as it needed to be. It left itself vulnerable to competition. It was only a matter of time before someone created something better.

Because we're in a small town and somewhat isolated from the fast lane of high tech, we've been able to grow and concentrate on our work instead of being distracted by the competition and getting caught up in the soap opera of Silicon Valley.

I’m a big fan of the free market system but the free market system works [only] when you have robust competition.

We started as a small newspaper company and grew by providing competition and innovation in stale, near monopolistic markets.

The best industrial policy is competition.

Sometimes, for businesses, competition can be inconvenient, because competition means that the race is never over, the game is never won. No matter how well you were doing in the past, there's always someone who are out there wanting to take your place. So the temptation to avoid competition is powerful. It's rooted in motives as old as Adam and Eve: in greed for yet more money, in fear of losing your position in the market and all the benefits it brings.

I think it's a completely good thing to want to do business, to want to make money and be a success in the marketplace, to get the attention of customers. I'm not in the business of pointing fingers or blaming companies, but there is a limit to everything.

You can be big, and you can be successful, but you cannot abuse your power to stop others from challenging you from being the next big thing in five or ten years.

A real economic development policy would address the root issues hampering business growth, like access to credit and marketplaces so dominated by giant companies that it is impossible to compete.

Competition matters.

I go to class every day with the future Facebook and Twitter and Google employees, the future innovators and entrepreneurs who might have the next big thing. Knowing that and seeing their success and work ethic makes you want to be successful. It impresses me every day. It humbles me, too.

People said, 'MySpace is going to rule and dominate all Internet; all young people will live on MySpace.' Well, along comes Facebook. And, obviously, all the innovation that Apple is doing.

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are building their own versions of the future. And they get bigger and bigger.

Who can object to a monopoly when any new company, if it is built around a scientific nucleus, can create a new monopoly of its own by creating a wholly new field?

You want an idea that turns into a monopoly. But you can't get a monopoly, in a big market right away; too much competition for that.

If life was so easy that you could just go buy success, there would be a lot more successful companies in the world. Successful enterprises are built from the ground up.

For entrepreneurs, ignorance is not bliss. It's fatal. It's costly. And it's for losers. You either get organized, or get crushed.

It is hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300-plus people couldn't compete with six people in blue jeans.

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.

Everybody wants to make something they think is a surefire winner, though nobody knows what a surefire winner is, in my opinion.

You go ask any founder of any company why he or she did it, you will never hear, "I wanted to create jobs for the community" as the number one, number two, number three, number four, number five, number 10 reason for doing so. That is a result of the success the business enjoys. Creating jobs is not why people start businesses. Creating jobs is not how people innovate in business. It's not how they compete.

Twitter is great and it's glorious and it's easy, but if somebody comes up with something kind of like Twitter tomorrow, that's better or smarter or more useful, in three weeks time, Twitter could more or less be history because that's how fast things go.