The Biggest Risk Is Not Taking Any Risk

Zuckerberg attributed this line to Peter Thiel in his August 2016 How to Build the Future interview with Sam Altman: Peter was the person who told me this really pithy quote that, ‘In a world that’s changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.’ Thiel was Facebook’s first outside investor in 2004 and served on the board through 2022, so the line traveled with their working relationship, not as a posted slogan.

In the same interview Zuckerberg applied it to big company moves: people focus on how hard a major direction change is, and skip past the downside of staying in the same direction. The line names that second downside.