Peter Thiel Quotes

The trick is, a market has to be nonexistent when you start. If the market is large early on, you will have too many competitors. You have to make it large.

If companies don't think systemically enough - if they try to capture too much of the value - eventually, innovation moves somewhere else.

What does the name Virgin mean? We are a company that likes to take on the giants. In too many businesses, these giants have had things their own way. We are going to have fun competing with them.

Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

Basically if you study entrepreneurs, there is a misnomer: People think that entrepreneurs take risk, and they get rewarded because they take risk. In reality entrepreneurs do everything they can to minimize risk. They are not interested in taking risk. They want free lunches and they go after free lunches.

Most of what we've done at SurveyMonkey is create a market, which I would say is much harder than trying to enter a market that already exists. But if you get it right, it can become a great business.

I look at every business and ask, How long can this last? How can I identify the status quo and change it?

Design is a tool that either allows us to create new markets or disrupt existing ones.

Except in very narrow cases, where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you're toast anyway.

In America, when you bring an idea to market, you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share. In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China - execution is.

Google worries - and rightly so - about how hard it is for a big company to come up with the next hot thing.

Innovation must lead infrastructure for a simple but compelling reason: Innovation produces new types of products and markets, and it is virtually impossible to know how to run those markets efficiently before they are created.

My desire to participate in the business is not to make more crap.

You have to be willing to risk things; otherwise, somebody else will put you out of business.

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It's the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

Customers are willing to try new things, and if you can survive, you will have fewer competitors. It's like entering the eye of the storm. As long as you are strong enough to survive, you can end up in still water by yourself.

When I came into the mobile phone business, I was really the upstart who pretty much took the business, not quite by storm, but really made an impact on it quite early on. But it was from a position, really, of feeling that I was a last mover.

Whatever business you're in - it doesn't matter - it's going to commoditize over time. It's going to devalue. You've got to keep moving it to a higher value.

... whatever business you're in, it doesn't matter, it's going to commoditize over time, it's going to devalue, you've got to keep moving it to a higher value. Keep going to a higher value in whatever it is that you do and force yourself and force the organization to always do it ahead of time

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

If I knew what the next big thing was, I'd be doing it now.

If you're doing business, not that simple to only buy. You have to create something. You have to create something that never exist for the future.

We may not have the cheapest labor costs, but where we can compete is innovation. Historically, that's been Connecticut's strength, and it can be again.

To thrive, all businesses must focus on the art of self-disruption. Rather than wait for the competition to steal your business, every founder and employee needs to be willing to cannibalize their existing revenue streams in order to create new ones. All disruption starts with introspection.

I have no problem with money coming in and spawning competition. I am honest enough to admit that Mahindra & Mahindra would not have been going to the IITs and doing research if there was no competition.