Peter Thiel

the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all.

a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage. Anything less than an order of magnitude better will probably be perceived as a marginal improvement and will be hard to sell, especially in an already crowded market.

cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero.

own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.

At the macro level, the single word for horizontal progress is globalization—taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere.

Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.

In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better.

The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself.

In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).