Vignesh Swaminathan > Vignesh's Quotes

“Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Eroom’s law—that’s Moore’s law backward—observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready--for nothing in particular.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Entrepreneurship: you put one dumb foot in front of the other while the world throws bricks at your head.”
― Peter Thiel

“moving first is a tactic, not a goal.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances…. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
― V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
― Noam Chomsky

“We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”
― Joseph Campbell

“If you are falling....dive.”
― Joseph Campbell

“You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.”
― Joseph Campbell

“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.”
― Joseph Campbell

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
― Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato