Ideally, I want us to be working on things where if we're not working on them, they won't happen; companies where if we don't fund them they will not receive funding.

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.

Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don't like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people's couches.

People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.

The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

The core problem in our society is political correctness.

Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.

It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they've made their peace with death.

When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?

Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.

The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present - and that's not fully valued.

If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done.

Great things happen only once.

Spiraling demand for resources of which our world contains a finite supply is the great long-term threat posed by globalisation. That is why we need new technology to relieve it.

You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.

Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.

People always say you should live your life as if it were your last day. I think you should live your life as though it will go on for ever; that every day is so good that you don't want it to end.

A diploma is a dunce hat in disguise.

Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.

The future is limitless.

Airbnb is undervalued.

When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.

Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.

We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.