More Words of Wisdom from Peter Thiel

by Scott Edward Walker on July 1st, 2014

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we share a brief video of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we again present Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and a brilliant entrepreneur and investor.

In this interesting clip (courtesy of the Munich DLD Conference last year), Peter shares some words of wisdom for entrepreneurs, including the following:

• “The challenge as a…technology entrepreneur is to identify businesses where you’re doing something very new, but it is also somehow very sustainable over time.” (at 3:17)
• “The most important thing…is to be the last-mover advantage, and the great technology businesses are often the last in their category.” (at 5:10)
• “The kinds of businesses that I think are great have some combination of very talented people, a breakthrough technology, but also a long-term business strategy…” (at 6:33)
• “People are afraid of being incredibly successful.” (at 10:51)
• “[Great businesses] get built by people who in some sense think the business is more valuable than anything else, including the money you can get for it…” (at 11:18)
• “You need to be able to invest in people who believe they’re doing something new [and] transformative, that’s really going to change the world and [who] will stick with it over time.” (at 12:53)
• “The great technology businesses are in some sense unique and one of a kind.” (at 13:22)
• “What valuable business is nobody thinking of creating?  If there are a lot of people thinking of creating the same business, you should just open a restaurant.” (at 14:11)
• “All [great] businesses start with a story about how they’re going to change the world – how there’s something that people have not yet understood.” (at 15:01)
• “You need to have an answer why the twentieth talented person will join your company rather than a Google or some other successful technology business where they can get paid more, they can work less – and it will be safer [and] cushier.” (at 16:03)

I hope you enjoy it.  Cheers, Scott