More Words of Wisdom from Peter Thiel
by Scott Edward Walker on August 6th, 2015
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, author of the book “Zero to One,” and a brilliant entrepreneur and investor.
In this interesting interview from last year (courtesy of the Forbes Under 30 Summit), Peter shares some words of wisdom for entrepreneurs, including the following:
- “Every moment in the history of business happens only once.” (at 1:26)
- “Great businesses are zero to one – they’re always one of a kind.” (at 2:04)
- “The one theme I always come back to…is this need for differentiation. What are you doing that nobody else is doing?” (at 2:21)
- “If you’re a founder or an entrepreneur, you should always aim to build a monopoly – where you’re the only person in the world doing what you’re doing.” (at 2:47)
- “The core thing is to have a great product, and then you can always improve and iterate on that in all sorts of ways.” (at 6:43)
- “It’s great to be working on problems where if you weren’t working on them nobody else would…” (at 11:39)
- “I think it’s generally much better to [start a company] with people you know well. There’s some debates about whether it’s good to do it with your best friends or not. But it’s generally a bad idea to do it with people you don’t know at all.” (at 15:48)
I hope you enjoy it. Cheers, Scott