32 Quotes from Peter Thiel on Business Strategy and Monopoly Theory
From How to Start a Startup — Lecture 5
From Stanford’s CS183B Course How to Start a Startup — Lecture 5
The quotes below are all 140 characters or less, so please feel free to share as you see fit. In case I’ve missed any quotes or you find any errors, please leave me a comment and I will be sure to update the post.
- “If you’re the founder…entrepreneur starting a company, you always want to aim for monopoly and you always want to avoid competition”
- “A business creates X dollars of value and captures Y% of X. X and Y are independent variables”
- “If you get a creative monopoly for inventing something new, I think it’s symptomatic of having created something really valuable.”
- “There are exactly 2 kinds of businesses in this world. Businesses that are perfectly competitive and businesses that are monopolies.”
- “Anyone that has a monopoly will pretend that they’re in incredible competition”.
- “If the monopolists pretend not to have monopolies & the non-monopolists pretend to have monopolies, the apparent difference is very small”
- “If you’re a non-monopolist, you will rhetorically describe your market as super small, you’re the only person in that market.”
- “If you have a monopoly, you will describe it as super big, and there is lots of competition in it.”
- “The something of somewhere is just the nothing of nowhere.It’s like the Stanford of North Dakota- one of a kind, but its not Stanford.”
- “One has to always be super aware that there are these very powerful incentives to distort the nature of these markets.”
- “If you’re a startup, you want to get to a monopoly”
- “The thing that’s always a big mistake is going after a giant market on Day 1”
- “Almost all successful companies in Silicon Valley had some model of starting with small markets and expanding.”
- “If the initial market at FB was 10,000 people at Harvard, it went from 0 to 60% marketshare in 10 days. That was a very auspicious start”
- “…a minnow in a vast ocean, that’s not a good place to be. That means you have tons of competitors and you don’t even know who [they] are.”
- “You want to be a 1 of a kind company, where it’s the only one in a small ecosystem.”
- “Go after small markets, often markets that are so small that people don’t even notice them, they don’t think they make sense.”
- “These very small markets are quite underrated.”
- “I think all happy companies are are different, because they are doing something very unique.”
- “All unhappy companies are alike, because they fail to escape the essential sameness which is competition”
- “My…somewhat arbitrary rule of thumb is you want to have a technology that’s an order of magnitude better than the next best thing”
- “The thing about network effects is that they are often very hard to get started.”
- “The critical thing about these monopolies is, it’s not enough to have a monopoly for just a moment.”
- “I always think in some ways, the better framing is you want to be the last mover. You want to be the last company in a category”
- “One of the things we overvalue in Silicon Valley is growth rates and we undervalue durability”
- “Scientists never make any money.They’re always diluted into thinking that they live in a just universe that’ll reward them for their work”
- “Vertical integration is sort of a very under explored modality of technological progress that people would do well to look at more”
- “There is something about the world of bits, as opposed to the world of atoms, where you can often get very fast adoption”
- “It’s not that when lots of people are trying to do something, that that’s proof of it being valuable.”
- “I think that when lots of people are trying to do something, that is often proof of insanity.”
- “Don’t always go through the tiny little door that everyone is trying to rush through…”
- “…maybe go around the corner and go through the vast gate that no one’s taking.”
Please note that while the above quotes summarize key parts of Peter Thiel’s lecture, they do not cover his deep dive into the history of innovation which I highly recommend watching. As a result, here is the link where you can watch the entire lecture for yourself: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec05/
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Image Credit: Peter Theil at the Hy! Summit — March 19, 2014 — Image by Dan Taylor-128 — By Heisenberg Media
