20 quotes on entrepreneurship that show why libertarian entrepreneur Peter Thiel is pure genius

Wednesday December 21, 2016 , 2 min Read

He’s a libertarian entrepreneur who co-founded PayPal and invested in Facebook. But besides being an outstanding entrepreneur and investor, Peter Thiel is also an acclaimed author and a political activist who has also established a fellowship programme that encourages students to drop out of college! His celebrated book, Zero to One, is considered to make anyone feel like a superhuman, and judging by his credentials, he’s bound to have some interesting things to say about entrepreneurship. Let’s take a look at a few.

Image credits: www.heisenbergmedia.com

“Many entrepreneurs focus only on short term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t.”
“It’s a really good time to be an entrepreneur. If you have a halfway decent idea, you can get it completely funded.”
“Entrepreneurship: you put one dumb foot in front of the other while the world throws bricks at your head.”
“A startup is a team of people on a mission and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.”
“As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.”
“If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.”
“In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything.”
“Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.”
“Selling your company to the media is a necessary part of selling it to everyone.”
“The best way to create productivity is to get rid of people.”
“Every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.”
“Everyone at your company should be different in the same way – a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.”
“You can achieve your 10-year plan in the next six months.”
“Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”
“Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.”
“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.”
“If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme.”
“It’s true that every great entrepreneur is first and foremost a designer.”
“A startup is the largest endeavour over which you can have definite mastery.”
“The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places.”