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.
Peter ThielRead
Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions 'When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?' A bad answer is, 'We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.'
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of deep relationships and a shared history in founding a successful company.
Peter Thiel suggests that successful companies are often founded by individuals who have established a meaningful relationship and a solid understanding of each other's strengths over time. Quick connections formed merely for the sake of entrepreneurship typically lack the foundational depth needed for enduring collaboration and success.
In practice
In a conference about startup success stories, I might share this quote to emphasize the importance of building strong relationships.
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.
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.
The actual sight of a first-class house that a Negro has built is ten times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought to build, or perhaps could build.
I can't tell you what an honor it is, to even be mentioned in the same breath with Arthur Ashe. This is something I certainly will treasure forever.
I wish for a world where success is measured not by what we take nor by what we get. Just by what we give. And who we become.
One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you're allowed to fail.
At a startup, it's hard enough to get a single thing right, much less a whole bunch of things. Especially if the things you are trying to do are not only dissimilar but actively impede each other.
Prior to the App Store, the chances of that happening, of somebody really young forming a company and in a period of no time really becoming a global provider of a game or something else, it really didn't happen. Now there are these success stories popping up everywhere.
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