Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
$0.99
Related Products
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.”—Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta
“Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.”—Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla
The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.
Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.
Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.
Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.
Pieter D. Rossouw –
A Propely Prescribed pair of Specacles that puts the world in focus
This book is like a pair of Prescription Spectacles that put the Innovation Startup Business world, into Sharp Focus.When I first saw the price I almost hit exit. However, I thought “If this guy has the balls to ask this price, this book had better be good”. Else I’m going to roast him in my Amazon review. I ain’t roasting!!As usual I attacked reading this book in concept extraction mode for my normal initial scan read. Chapter 6, You are not a Lottery Ticket, hit me with a Baseball bat right between the eyes. and slowed my reading pace down to almost snails’. Despite this slow first read, this Chapter deserved a re-read, at almost letter by letter speed. Almost every word or phrase brings an idea from the past, often vague, to the fore and into sharp focus. When I finished my first highlighting trip, almost every word in this chapter was lit. I had to choose and eliminate some of them.In Zero to One, Thiel explores the world of New Business Creation. I would have loved using the word entrepreneurship but excessive and inappropriate use by “experts” have stripped this word of it’s true meaning. We even invented a new version in South Africa under the ANC – Tenderpreneur.True entrepreneurship from basics is the creation of a New business that facilitates Economic Development by providing an Inventive New Product creating a New Market Sector that facilitates New Consumer Productivity enhancing opportunities.In Thiel’s thesis, basic human attitudes can be split into a 2×2 matrix. I also tend to think in 2×2 matrixi. So this chapter fitted my mind. But Wow did he blow my mind with his various Definite vs Indefinite and Optimistic vs Pessimistic discussions. Despite many years in multinational business I could not fault the Author on any of his explanations. He clarified a lot for me. One of them “strategically humble” is certainly a new, yet valid descriptor for a company with a profitable monopoly. Yet in their Financial market press releases, they deliberately select a market description that yields for them a minority market share in a large market and not their true market share in the niche they dominate totally. (Are they hiding from Monopoly acuzations?)A few key quotes.”In the 1950’s, Americans thought big plans for the future were too important to be left to experts”. (San Francisco Dam)Ralph Waldo Emmerson is quoted as saying “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances ……… Strong men believe in cause and effect.”“you should do what you could, not focus on what you couldn’t” Is to my mind the Quote of the Year.Another hand clapper was “No one pretended that misfortune didn’t exist, but prior generations believed in making their own luck by working hard”I consider the following a nice funny; When Peter had to use either the words he or she in his text he seemed to consistently use she. I suppose this enables him to duck accusations of Sexism. Showing signs of being scared of Indefinite Pessimists?“We have to find our way back to a definite future, and the Western World needs nothing short of a cultural revolution to do it.”“ A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life,but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance”The rest of the book is devoted to discussing the practicalities of founding Innovative Startups successfully. These are focused at exploiting what is commonly considered a secret simply because nobody has really explored it before. Their uniqueness create innovative monopoly opportunities – the key source of profit.One of the issues discussed is; Power Law; We all know the Pareto principle is valid and 80-20 describes the unequal distribution of results in everything. Peter adds these considerations;“It defines our surroundings so completely that we usually don’t see it”.He continues with; “but everyone needs to know exactly one thing that even venture capitalists struggle to understand: we don’t live in a normal world; we live under power law.”In this way many other facets of Startup founding are discussed practically.In the end I came away with the following thought pattern;A potential successful startup founder is someone who is a Definite Optimist with a long term perspective, prepared to take risks. Who has a mind open enough to identify factual or human secrets that need illumination. Who is prepared to do the hard work necessary to acquire the factual knowledge needed to explore this secret and find a way to change this mystery into a solution. Who is capable of funding this idea or selling it to Venture Funders to acquire funding. Who is prepared to expend the effort to develop the idea into a useful practical end product that solves something significant for a new market sector. AND; Who then has the flexibility to turn around from dreaming, research and creativity. To then display the tenacity to knuckle down to make this idea work in practice, prepared to live through the low personal income initial loss making era, building the practical business.Thanks – A stimulating read, well worth the time and money – even for retired me!
Joshua Greenfield –
Thanks for the food for thought, but the parts about monopolies seem fit only for a pre-utopian revised social contract.
Peter Thiel navigates many interesting discussions. However, his examples of monopolies are of his own special definition of ‘monopoly’–the nearest example being Microsoft towards the end of the Clinton administration, and that only “…monopolistic…” because it wasn’t entire and was of a temporary nature. Competition begats redundancy and while that begats negative externalities it also begats a more diverse set of job opportunities for the top tier and also-rans. A society where there were only true monopolies would mean that the proletariat would probably have to starve to death, work for wages insufficient to serve as a positive extrinsic motivator (mostly just enough to narrowly escape the fear of death or a more general suffering), or else we would have to move further and further away from a market based economy to a planned one for the sake of avoiding fates as unemployable marauders, murderers, cannibals, and those who were wealthy enough or minimally viable economic units to murder through indifference and agreement to see the surplus humanity as criminals deserving of their horrible fates.Enjoyed the book, but I think that the hunt for monopoly is delusional. However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good starting point for evaluating the potential of a business. However, competition is inevitable in the short-run unless one has the capital to support research and development on materials and machines with internationally-recognized patent potential. In the long run, it is inevitable anyway because the head-start that having a patent gives you for perhaps 20 years (less if you spend any of it as an NPE) expires and if you wasted capital on failed marketing attempts and failed to up the ante with another well-timed patented improvement on the technology then a competitor who has observed your mistakes will surely come along and leverage your technology and their own patented improvement on it to steal the market you’ve made.I think that monopolies COULD be desirable within the context of a pre-utopian society that held it as its existential purpose to solve scarcity and put every sentient being to work on a variety of activities that best leveraged their abilities at achieving our collective utopia. Why waste resources when there are other hard problems to solve? However, that’s not the world we live in. We live in a world where any sanction against competition means that the carrying capacities of our societies increase suffering and general idleness for the poor. In one of his last books, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the importance of jobs for their own sake in some present-to-future state of an economy. Peter Thiel is a libertarian so he presumably doesn’t like shiftless bums, but widespread embrace of monopolistic behavior would lead to exactly that and demand that government become even more lionized as moral compass to either employ or subsidize the poor. Everyone is better off when everyone works and monopolies have no social contract with the public to hire people they do not need, while competing firms intrinsically involve occupational redundancy and increase human carrying capacity within a society.If Peter Thiel would like to use his wealth to save the fate of mankind, I have a plan for an alternate form of government called anarcho-technocracy, which seeks to combine direct democracy, rule by consensus of the demonstrably informed, universal employment, and autodidactic lifelong education to support upward mobility in both hobbies and jobbies. As he is a self-avowed Christian, I would like to pitch him on the theological inspiration for the form of government, which previously existed for a period for roughly 260 years in Israel prior to the coronation of Saul .What it comes down to is these points:1) If you’re worth following, then rational people will follow (whether you want them to or not).2) The will of uninformed or irrational people should not be allowed to supersede the authority of those who cared enough to inform themselves about the policy in question. The barrier to suffrage is one’s own commitment to accessing and comprehending freely available and actively promulgated information. If you can’t meet that barrier, then it is unjust and immoral that ignorance (regardless of headcount) should win because, with little exception, the number of people who are informed about a narrowly defined public policy or industry topic at a level greater than or equal to a C- is much smaller than the number of people who know less or are indifferent.3) The cult of personality is always a bad thing and policy grab bags make rational administration of the public good and encouragement of public-private partnerships inconsistent and unreliable. We have achieved an information technology infrastructure sufficient that cults of personality and policy grab bags are neither the fairest, most rational, most expedient, or most informed ways of solving problems any longer.4) Few rules need to be set in stone beyond redaction and their subversioned or subversive amendments are only ever sub-cultural and so are best left to the local-most level of government (strong federal, strong regions, and strong counties) with rulings on an arbitration between concerned parties (individuals and organizations) fast-tracking directly to the widest scope of government where the preponderance of consequences might be externalized and with votes on any referendum and ruling being weighted towards those with skin in the game yet including anyone who sought to know the facts to at least a C- level.Why do I think that this would work better? Everybody is obligated to work for better instead of being excluded from the process arbitrarily–if you don’t like a policy–inform yourself, propose a better idea, persuade others. If the experts and those with capital involved agree, it can happen more quickly without having to convince or bribe those who neither have capital involved nor have bothered to understand the facts let alone their provenance.
Percy –
Book is just superb. I have read it over and over again, time by time. And there is just too much ideas to unpacked. I would recommend those who are serious in doing start-ups, to build a reading list, like at least one book for each concept introduced, as otherwise, there is a lot you are going to be missed out and be confused.
Jay Patel –
A nice read and a good starter book to understand how the world of startups work.
Hashim Seead Alsherif –
if you’re a startup guy like me you should buy it… you won’t regret
Joan Vidal-Jove –
Great and different book about how to progress in business
Cliente Amazon –
Libro molto interessante, da leggere. Analizza con diversi esempi la traiettoria e le strategie delle start-up, con concetti, a volte un po’ estremizzati, ma mai banali.