It's good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work.
Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don't like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people's couches.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Investors tend to favor investments they are familiar with, impacting their choices in venture capital.
Peter Thiel's quote illustrates a common bias among investors who are more inclined to put their money into ventures that resonate with their personal experiences or preferences. It highlights the notion that familiarity breeds comfort, and this tendency can lead to missed opportunities in sectors outside of their understanding, such as when investors overlook concepts like Airbnb because they prefer traditional luxury accommodations over more unconventional options.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about investment strategies, one might reference this quote to emphasize the importance of understanding market choices.
More from Peter Thiel
All quotes →The first question we would ask if aliens landed on this planet is not, 'What does this mean for the economy or jobs?' It would be, 'Are they friendly or unfriendly?'
People working on bigger ideas on a more protracted timeline will be more on the stealth side. They aren’t releasing new PR announcements every day. The bigger the secret and the likelier it is that you alone have it, the more time you have to execute. There may be far more people going after hard secrets than we think.
What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?
Every time you write an email, it is in the public domain. There are all these ways where security is not as good as people believe.
Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.
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If your goal is anything but profitability - if it's to be big, or to grow fast, or to become a technology leader - you'll hit problems.
There are good examples of companies - Coca-Cola is one - that invested before there was a huge market in countries, and I think that ended up playing out to their benefit for decades to come.
Rules that may be easy for Wall Street are a death sentence for startups. They are easy to break accidentally and the penalty for noncompliance is severe.
I'm a believer that you accomplish much, much more with direct relationships than by using an intermediary. And that cash you keep in the bank can be the difference between staying alive as a small business, or not.