Peter Thiel: ‘We attribute too much to luck. Luck is an atheistic word for God’

Entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel suggests his success comes from skill rather than luck. Here, he talks about university, investing in people and mortality



Peter Thiel, entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder. Photograph: Robyn Twomey/Corbis

Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer, Saturday 20 September 2014

In 1998, Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal and four years later sold up for $1.5bn. He went on to be Facebook’s first investor, buying a 10% share (his advice to Mark Zuckerberg was deceptively simple: “Just don’t fuck it up”). He also co-founded Palantir Technologies with funds from the CIA’s venture capital arm and which, it is claimed, helped to locate Osama bin Laden. He is now one of the most successful and influential investors in Silicon Valley, and an outspoken supporter of libertarian politics and a major donor to causes as diverse as Ron Paul for president to Seasteading, an organisation that is aiming to create an offshore floating nation state.

Your book, Zero to One, is based on a course that you taught at Stanford University. And yet in the book, you’re very vocal about how universities are a waste of money and create a class of indentured slaves unable to think independently. Isn’t this a bit of a contradiction?

I don’t think universities are categorically bad. I think there’s something of an education bubble. It still is important to try to learn things. The goal I had in teaching this class on startups and entrepreneurship at Stanford was to try to figure out a way to convey all the knowledge that I have about business as an entrepreneur and investor over the last 15 years in Silicon Valley in the form of a single course. I’m trying to do the same thing with this book.

In the manifesto for your Founders Fund, you say: “We wanted flying cars and instead we got 140 characters.” Do you think that’s the problem, that we’ve been thinking too small?



Peter Thiel has donated money to Seasteading – a group which wants to create an offshore nation. Photograph: Emerson Stepp/Emerson Stepp

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/21/peter-thiel-paypal-luck-atheist-god

What a scummy weasel.

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian