Peter Thiel Quotes

I'm in favour of entrepreneurial, risk-taking businesses that create great products and services.

Taking a great new idea with an entrepreneurial team that wants to create something significant and trying to build a real company is what is interesting.

For decades, technology entrepreneurship has been revered, and people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk were heroes.

All the biggest companies are based on a founder who had a need, hacked it together, and said, 'Hey, other people might want this.'

For me, the winning strategy in any start-up business is, 'Think big but start small.'

By definition startups usually do not turn a profit.

I love working with really early stage startups where the outcome is still in doubt. Maybe they'll go on to greatness, or maybe they'll never get off the runway at all.

Once a few Facebook employees put together a promising idea and start a company, that's very exciting to people. I happen to think being a Facebook employee is really correlated with good ideas.

It's really easy to create a $1 billion company - you just have to solve a $10 billion problem.

Be careful not to start a company that really belongs as a feature of another company, like the 25 Twitter URL shortener companies out there. Pick a real problem that's here to stay.

Technology ventures can succeed with very little investment, unlike many other industries. A lot of the big Internet players like Google or Yahoo were started by a couple of guys with computers. Microsoft was started in Bill Gates' garage.

I want to create an environment where I can create technology, get it into the hands of someone to market it, and move on to other technologies so I can keep innovating. I want to be a serial entrepreneur: Incubate an idea, get it to a good state, and make that an enabler to get to the next state. It's every researcher's fantasy.

I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business.

I do think there are more and more entrepreneurs all the time that think big. Those are the people we should be finding and funding. Most of them will fail, but the ones who succeed will change the world, and that is progress.

Without disruptions, startups can't survive.

A startup, to a some degree, is a set of those challenges of, 'If you don't solve this, you're dead.'

My attitude is there are at least hundreds of interesting startups that are going to get going in every year.

A lot of entrepreneurship is seeing the future in a way that no one else sees it. Then, it becomes about execution and doing what it takes to succeed.

If you want to build a startup that has a good chance of succeeding, don't listen to me. Listen to Paul Graham and others who are applying tons of data to the idea of startup success. That will maximize your chance of being successful.

The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.

What interests me is starting businesses on our own, finding ideas that we can support, and simply investing in invention.

I focus on consumer Internet. Sometimes it's a working prototype; sometimes it's an idea on a napkin. I don't do a ton of deals a year, and I really like working with startups - it's the only way I can invest. It fits my ADD brain.

I want to create something like Sony. Not in terms of manufacturing products but creating something that is innovative, makes money, improves peoples' lives.

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.

I founded Atari in my garage in Santa Clara while at Stanford. When I was in school, I took a lot of business classes. I was really fascinated by economics. You end up having to be a marketeer, finance maven and a little bit of a technologist in order to get a business going.