In an interview with CapLinked.com (which Thiel is an investor in) Peter Thiel stated "My general analysis of my PayPal experience is that if I knew then everything I know now about the payments space, I would never have started the company. It would be too intimidating. There were a lot of extremely difficult challenges we didn’t expect in advance. In that crucible, I saw how truly transformative breakthrough technologies can be. And then there’s the macro-reality of economic growth, which holds that things only get better the more a society innovates."
The interview also talks about his investment in Facebook and is worth a read.
Earl Naegele says
June 26, 2011 at 6:42 pmExcuse me, but if he new that he would take it public for $1.5B he wouldn’t have started it….
Yeh, right!
Sean says
June 27, 2011 at 11:26 amAgreed. I think he is just saying it that way to illustrate how hard it actually was to build the company up, and not that, if future him had said “Hey, build paypal.com, and it’ll be worth a cool billion dollars, but it won’t be easy…” he would have said… nawwww.
🙂