Lessons from Peter Thiel

Obsess over perfection.

If you are designing something that a customer is going to use or that will represent us in public, it’s not good enough unless it’s flawless and extraordinary.

Especially in software, many situations have winner-take-all dynamics due to network effects and switching costs. Being the winner means being in the 99.99-percentil

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Return to first principles and act quickly on your new conclusions.

It’s very easy to take the world as it is, as opposed to envisioning it as you want it to be. For example, when re-designing a feature, one approach is to take what you have, and imagine small changes that will solve the problems with the feature. Instead, it’s often instructive t

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Take the time to listen to smart people with whom you disagree.

This is not easy to do. Over time, any firm will find that certain methods and biases tend to work very well, and the more successful it is, the more it will develop its own unique mindset. We couldn’t succeed without the methods and principles that we learn over time, nor can we cons

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In hiring, value intelligence highly. Like focus, intelligence yields increasing returns.

Like focus, intelligence has a convex output curve — the smartest people can be an order of magnitude more productive than others who are only somewhat less smart. The key in hiring is to value potential skill rather than currently existing skill — and potent

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2. Don’t divide your attention: focusing on one thing yields increasing returns for each unit of effort.

At a micro level, an extra hour of focus on the current project has a much higher return than an hour on something new, or worse, 5 minutes each on 12 new things. Before you ever do something new, you should understand the opportunity cost vs.

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