Peter Thiel

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.

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.'

How to teach people to do what hasn't been done is a great riddle.

Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'

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.

Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable.

Luck is like an atheistic word for God.

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.

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.

My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing.

There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley.

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

I think what's always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth.

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.

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.

Forget startup companies. The next frontier is startup countries.

Every university…seem[s] to reassure you that ‘it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.’ That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly at something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

Thinking about how disturbingly herdlike people become in so many different contexts - mimetic theory forces you to think about that, which is knowledge that's generally suppressed and hidden. As an investor-entrepreneur, I've always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.

What valuable company is nobody building?

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

You want to be the last company in a category. Those are the ones that are really valuable.