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Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Hardcover – September 16, 2014

by Peter Thiel (Author), Blake Masters (Author)

4.5 37,610 ratings

in Economic Policy & Development

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#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.

From the Publisher

The Economist says, “Zero to One should be read not just by aspiring entrepreneurs.”

WARNING: California’s Proposition 65

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Crisply written, rational and practical, Zero to One should be read not just by aspiring entrepreneurs but by anyone seeking a thoughtful alternative to the current pervasive gloom about the prospects for the world.”
– The Economist

"An extended polemic against stagnation, convention, and uninspired thinking. What Thiel is after is the revitalization of imagination and invention writ large…"
– The New Republic

"Might be the best business book I've read...Barely 200 pages long and well lit by clear prose and pithy aphorisms, Thiel has written a perfectly tweetable treatise and a relentlessly thought-provoking handbook."
– Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

“This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.”
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook

“Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.”
- Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla

" Zero to One is the first book any working or aspiring entrepreneur must read—period."
- Marc Andreessen, co-creator of the world's first web browser, co-founder of Netscape, and venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz

"Zero to One is an important handbook to relentless improvement for big companies and beginning entrepreneurs alike. Read it, accept Peter’s challenge, and build a business beyond expectations."
- Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE

“When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic.”
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan

“Thiel has drawn upon his wide-ranging and idiosyncratic readings in philosophy, history, economics, anthropology, and culture to become perhaps America’s leading public intellectual today”
- Fortune

"Peter Thiel, in addition to being an accomplished entrepreneur and investor, is also one of the leading public intellectuals of our time. Read this book to get your first glimpse of how and why that is true."
- Tyler Cowen, New York Times best-selling author of Average is Over and Professor of Economics at George Mason University

"The first and last business book anyone needs to read; a one in a world of zeroes."
- Neal Stephenson, New York Times best-selling author of Snow Crash, the Baroque Cycle, and Cryptonomicon

"Forceful and pungent in its treatment of conventional orthodoxies—a solid starting point for readers thinking about building a business."
- Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long- term thinking about the future.

Blake Masters was a student at Stanford Law School in 2012 when his detailed notes on Peter’s class “Computer Science 183: Startup” became an internet sensation. He is President of The Thiel Foundation and Chief Operating Officer of Thiel Capital.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social net-work. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, American companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today. What happens when we’ve gained everything to be had from fine- tuning the old lines of business that we’ve inherited? Unlikely as it sounds, the answer threatens to be far worse than the crisis of 2008. Today’s “best practices” lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.

In a world of gigantic administrative bureaucracies both public and private, searching for a new path might seem like hoping for a miracle. Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands, of miracles. This would be depressing but for one crucial fact: humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.

Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do more with less, ratcheting up our fundamental capabilities to a higher level. Other animals are instinctively driven to build things like dams or honeycombs, but we are the only ones that can invent new things and better ways of making them. Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world. These are the kind of elementary truths we teach to second graders, but they are easy to forget in a world where so much of what we do is repeat what has been done before.

Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything I’ve learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. But while I have noticed many patterns, and I relate them here, this book offers no formula for success. The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.

This book stems from a course about startups that I taught at Stanford in 2012. College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world. My primary goal in teaching the class was to help my students see beyond the tracks laid down by academic specialties to the broader future that is theirs to create. One of those students, Blake Masters, took detailed class notes, which circulated far beyond the campus, and in Zero to One I have worked with him to revise the notes for a wider audience. There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley.

Chapter 1

The Challenge of the Future

Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"

This question sounds easy because it's straightforward. Actually, it's very hard to answer. It's intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it's psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

Most commonly, I hear answers like the following:

"Our educational system is broken and urgently needs to be fixed."

"America is exceptional."

"There is no God."

Those are bad answers. The first and the second statements might be true, but many people already agree with them. The third statement simply takes one side in a familiar debate. A good answer takes the following form: "Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x." I'll give my own answer later in this chapter.

What does this contrarian question have to do with the future? In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come. But what makes the future distinctive and important isn't that it hasn't happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today. In this sense, if nothing about our society changes for the next 100 years, then the future is over 100 years away. If things change radically in the next decade, then the future is nearly at hand. No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: it's going to be different, and it must be rooted in today's world. Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present; good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.

Zero to One: The Future of Progress

When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work--going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things--going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.

At the macro level, the single word for horizontal progress is globalization--taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere. China is the paradigmatic example of globalization; its 20-year plan is to become like the United States is today. The Chinese have been straightforwardly copying everything that has worked in the developed world: 19th-century railroads, 20th-century air conditioning, and even entire cities. They might skip a few steps along the way--going straight to wireless without installing landlines, for instance--but they're copying all the same.

The single word for vertical, 0 to 1 progress is technology. The rapid progress of information technology in recent decades has made Silicon Valley the capital of "technology" in general. But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.

Because globalization and technology are different modes of progress, it's possible to have both, either, or neither at the same time. For example, 1815 to 1914 was a period of both rapid technological development and rapid globalization. Between the First World War and Kissinger's trip to reopen relations with China in 1971, there was rapid technological development but not much globalization. Since 1971, we have seen rapid globalization along with limited technological development, mostly confined to IT.

This age of globalization has made it easy to imagine that the decades ahead will bring more convergence and more sameness. Even our everyday language suggests we believe in a kind of technological end of history: the division of the world into the so-called developed and developing nations implies that the "developed" world has already achieved the achievable, and that poorer nations just need to catch up.

But I don't think that's true. My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India's hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do--using only today's tools--the result would be environmentally catastrophic. Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

New technology has never been an automatic feature of history. Our ancestors lived in static, zero-sum societies where success meant seizing things from others. They created new sources of wealth only rarely, and in the long run they could never create enough to save the average person from an extremely hard life. Then, after 10,000 years of fitful advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills and 16th-century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced relentless technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970. As a result, we have inherited a richer society than any previous generation would have been able to imagine.

Any generation excepting our parents' and grandparents', that is: in the late 1960s, they expected this progress to continue. They looked forward to a four-day workweek, energy too cheap to meter, and vacations on the moon. But it didn't happen. The smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old: only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury. That doesn't mean our parents were wrong to imagine a better future--they were only wrong to expect it as something automatic. Today our challenge is to both imagine and create the new technologies that can make the 21st century more peaceful and prosperous than the 20th.

Startup Thinking

New technology tends to come from new ventures--startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor's "traitorous eight" in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it's hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it's even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never invent an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.

Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company's most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0804139296
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown Currency; 1st edition (September 16, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780804139298
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0804139298
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.63 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Economic Policy & Development (Books)
- #5 in Starting a Business (Books)
- #29 in Entrepreneurship (Books)

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Blake Masters
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Blake Masters was a student at Stanford Law School in 2012 when his detailed notes on Peter’s class “Computer Science 183: Startup” became an internet sensation. He is President of The Thiel Foundation and Chief Operating Officer of Thiel Capital.
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Peter Thiel
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Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking about the future.
See more on the author's page

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1,371 customers mention "Readability"1,325 positive46 negative

Customers find the book easy to read and informative. They say it's a great read for anyone looking at venture capital investments, starting or running a business. The author is articulate and explains concepts in an understandable way. Readers appreciate the motivational lessons on how to navigate challenges and avoid failure.

"...His book is as good as his notes but some readers may be puzzled. It’s not a book about how to build start-ups...." Read more

"...Rest of the book is just good. A fairly easy read." Read more

"...It's deeply motivating and filled with lessons on how to navigate challenges and avoid failure. Don't let this one sit on the shelf!" Read more

"This book is a must read for anyone looking at venture capital investments, starting a business, running a business or consulting to a business...." Read more

1,033 customers mention "Insight"963 positive70 negative

Customers find the book insightful and valuable. It offers valuable lessons and perspective from a key leader. Readers appreciate the thought-provoking ideas and practical advice. The author's unique and informed view clearly distinguishes him as a key leader. They find the book interesting and unique, with some very valuable, interesting, and unique parts. Overall, readers describe the book as motivating and filled with lessons on how to navigate.

"...Thiel is a strong believer in exceptional achievements, in innovation just like in art or science. “..." Read more

"...It's deeply motivating and filled with lessons on how to navigate challenges and avoid failure. Don't let this one sit on the shelf!" Read more

"...It puts forth many basic elements that must be adhered to have a successful enterprise. I have already recommended it to several people...." Read more

"A unique perspective to reading and indeed an author that made me think about the present & future in ways I had not imagined...." Read more

118 customers mention "Value for money"92 positive26 negative

Customers find the book provides valuable insights and lessons for creating large-scale projects. They appreciate the author's experience, research, thought experiments, and future projections. The book is based on notes from Peter Thiel's lectures as taken by his student Blake Masters.

"...sometimes obvious, the book is full of useful advice and anecdotal lessons learned from tech startups' failures and successes...." Read more

"...Thanks – A stimulating read, well worth the time and money – even for retired me!" Read more

"It has some very valuable, interesting and unique parts (especially at the beginning) , and others that are very poor in my opinion...." Read more

"I had high hopes, but this book was just ok...." Read more

39 customers mention "Authenticity"39 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's authenticity. They find it honest and based on experience, with personal truths that are refreshing and genuine. The author has a high level of believability due to his real-world perspective. The book provides many real-life examples that help visualize and explain concepts introduced.

"...It contains a number of refreshing insights and personal truths that you won’t get from other books on inventing the next big thing...." Read more

"...It's a short reflection, so bright and true that you'll start highlighting all of it until all pages are red...." Read more

"...This seems to take a very real and genuine look into how Peter Thiel views the world (obviously through his own words), the same worldview that..." Read more

"...Caveat lector. I for one, thinks Peter has a high level of believability due to his real world experience of venture capital and..." Read more

32 customers mention "Uniqueness"29 positive3 negative

Customers appreciate the book's originality. They find it insightful and unconventional, introducing many new and unconventional ideas. The book is different from other books in its approach and makes it stand out in the market.

"...Differentiation creates value as companies charge more for desirable products and services that customers can’t get anywhere else...." Read more

"It has some very valuable, interesting and unique parts (especially at the beginning) , and others that are very poor in my opinion...." Read more

"...to the contrarian approach of Peter Thiel, a truly original intellectual product more resembling a synthesis of René Girard, Leo Strauss, and..." Read more

"...The book is based on the incredible proposition of creating a new market. Superbly written. Highly recommend." Read more

30 customers mention "Shortness"16 positive14 negative

Customers have different views on the book's length. Some find it insightful and a quick read, while others wish it was longer. The index at the end is long, providing valuable insights.

"Rarely one stumbles upon a tiny book like this. Short, so densely packed with real - world wisdom. This is not a book on entrepreneurship...." Read more

"...This book is like a 4.4 out of 5. It's pretty short and a lot of the best points come from the earlier parts of the book...." Read more

"...This book is an easy read and short enough to get done in a few days to a week...." Read more

"...It's short, but there are no wasted words...." Read more

57 customers mention "Content"4 positive53 negative

Customers find the content superficial and lacking in depth. They mention it lacks scholarly depth and leaves much to be desired. The topics are boring and disconnected from each other, making the content unmemorable. Readers also mention that the book lacks substance in actual implementation and overemphasizes the writer's colleagues.

"...There are also topics very boring and disconnected from each other." Read more

"...His arguments regarding comparison of man and machine is extremely trivial and simplistic...." Read more

"...Minus 3 stars for political correctness and rambling pseudointellectual filler." Read more

"Now, the first couple of chapters weren't great. Too basic, other books present that material better. The rest of the book is just Golden...." Read more

52 customers mention "Structure"9 positive43 negative

Customers find the book's structure fragmented and disjointed. They mention it's inconsistent and poorly put together. The last two chapters are weak and disconnected from the content. Many of the arguments are made poorly and unconvincingly. The narrative sometimes gets stuck at Peter Thiel's own ideas, and there are many jarring inconsistencies and conflicts of ideas.

"...and encouragement of public-private partnerships inconsistent and unreliable...." Read more

"...I actually enjoy (makes for a quick read), but many of his arguments are made poorly (sometimes unconvincingly). There are no citations in this book...." Read more

"...10x? If you say so mr. Thiel. He is also somewhat contradictory throughout the book, and uses hindsight bias to ‘back into’ points he..." Read more

"...This book is Thiel telling you how he sees the world. The tone can be a bit dismissive, egotistical and illustrates some hubris, particularly as it..." Read more

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Herve Lebret
Thiel has more wise things to teach you than just crazy though brilliant visions.
Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2015
Verified Purchase
I have been reading Thiel‘s Zero to One in the last days. And after a compilation of his class notes last year, here are a few more comments. His book is as good as his notes but some readers may be puzzled. It’s not a book about how to build start-ups. (For this read Horowitz or Blank) “This book offers no formula for success. The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.” [Page 2]

Thiel is a strong believer in exceptional achievements, in innovation just like in art or science. “The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today:
1. Make incremental advances
2. Stay lean and flexible
3. Improve on the competition
4. Focus on products, not sales.
These lessons have become dogma in the startup world. (…) And yet the opposite principles are probably more correct:
1. It is better to risk boldness than trivaility
2. A bad plan is better than no plan
3. Competitive markets destroy profits
4. Sales matters just as much as product.“
[Pages 20-21]

There is one point where I disagree with Thiel. Though I tend to be convinced by his argument that monopoly is good and competition is bad – read Thiel with care for the subtlety of his arguments – I do not think he is right when he writes [page 33]: “Monopolies drive progress because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate”. I prefer Levine and Boldrin. Now I do believe that established players are displaced by new players – not competitors – who innovate when the champions who have become dinosaurs stop being creative.

Thiel does not believe in luck. “You are not a lottery ticket” and I agree that you can minimize uncertainty by carefully planning and probably by adapting too. He still quotes [page 59] Buffett who considers himself “a member of the lucky sperm club and a winner of the ovarian lottery”. He also quotes Bezos with his “incredible planetary alignment” (which has not much to do with luck either). According to Thiel. success is never accidental.

I also like his piece about founders: “Bad decisions made early on – if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example – are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation. When you start something, the first and most crucial decision you make is whom to start it with. Choosing a co-founder is like getting married, and founder conflict is just as ugly as divorce. Optimism abounds at the start of every relationship. It’s unromantic to think soberly about what could go wrong, so people don’t. But if the founders develop irreconcilable differences, the company becomes the victim.” [page 108]

Ands now about sales: “In engineering a solution either works or fails. [Sales is different]. This strikes engineers as trivial if not fundamentally dishonest. They know they own jobs are hard so when they look at salespeople laughing on the phone with a customer or going to two-hour lunches, they suspect that no real work is being done. If anything, people overestimate the relative difficulty of science and engineering, because the challenges of those fields are obvious. What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to makes sales look easy. Sales is hidden. All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity. That’s why the word “salesman” can be a slur and the used car dealer is our archetype of shadiness. But we react negatively to awkward, obvious salesmen – that is, the bad ones. There’s a wide range of sales ability: there are many gradations between novices, experts and masters. […] Like acting, sales works best when hidden. This explains why almost everyone whose job involves distribution – whether they’re in sales, marketing, or advertising – has a job title that has nothing to do with those things: account executive, bus. dev, but also investment banker, politician. There’s a reason for these re-descriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we’re being sold. […] The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that “it sells itself”. But anyone who would actually say this about a real product must be lying: either he’s delusional (lying to himself) or he’s selling something (and thereby contradicting himself). […] It’s better to think of distribution as something essential to the design of your product. If 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.” [Pages 128-130] And if you do not like it said this way, watch HBO’s Silicon Valley episode 15… I may come with more comments when I am finished with this great book.

In fact I have... and here are a few more comments, less about entrepreneurship than about social issues. Whatever the reputation of Thiel in Silicon Valley as a possible Libertarian, there were a couple of topics he addresses very convincingly. He is not a pure Contrarian. He disagrees with mainstream fashion in a very serious manner. Here are a couple of examples:

– The machine will not replace humankind
Yes computers have made impressive progress in the recent decades, but not to the point of replacing mankind. He shows very convincingly through the cases of Paypal and Palantir [pages 144-148] that computers cannot solve automatically tough issues but are only (excellent and critical) complements to human beings. Even the Google experiment of recognizing cats “seems impressive – until you remember that an average four-year-old can do it flawlessly” [page 143]. He finishes his chapter about Man and Machine this way: “But even if strong AI is a real possibility rather than an imponderable mystery, it won’t happen anytime soon: replacement by computers is a worry for the 22nd century. Indefinite fears about the far future shouldn’t stop us from making definite plans today. Luddites claim that we shouldn’t build the computers that might replace people someday; crazed futurists argue that we should. These two positions are mutually exclusive but they are not exhaustive: there is room in between for sane people to build a vastly better world in the decades ahead. As we find new ways to use computers, they won’t just get better at the kinds of things people already do: they’ll help us to do what was previously unimaginable” [pages 150-151]. You will not be surprised I prefer this to Kurweil views.

– Greentech was a bubble and it was obvious from day 1.
I was always puzzled with greentech/cleantech. Why are people so excited about the promise to solve an important problem when we do not have any solution. Thiel is far tougher. First he shows the obvious: it was a bubble. Then he analyzes this industry through his “zero to one” arguments.
“Most cleantech companies crashed because they neglected one or more of the seven questions that every business must answer:
– Engineering: can you create a breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?
– Timing: is now the right time to start your particular business?
– Monopoly: are you starting with a big share of a small market?
– People: do you have the right team?
– Distribution: do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?
– Durability: will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?
– Secret: have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?
If you do not have answers to these questions, you’ll run into lots of “bad luck” and your business will fail. If you nail all seven, you’ll master fortune and succeed. Even getting five or six correct might work. But the striking thing about the cleantech bubble was that people were starting companies with zero good answers – and that meant hoping for a miracle” [page 154]. What’s next? Fintech?

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Kathy/Jim W.
Excellent Main Point
Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2024
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Concept of 0 to 1 and 1 to “n” is a wow and so much the way techies think. Rest of the book is just good. A fairly easy read.

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D. Evans
Excellent book and transaction!
Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2024
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This book is a must read for anyone looking at venture capital investments, starting a business, running a business or consulting to a business. It puts forth many basic elements that must be adhered to have a successful enterprise. I have already recommended it to several people. I feel so strongly anbout the book I have even offered to buy it for them.

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Muhammad Umar Farooq
Complete this book at the earliest available opportunity.
Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2024
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Complete this book at the earliest available opportunity—it's simply too good to leave for another time. The insights it offers extend beyond business, providing valuable perspectives for personal growth as well. It's deeply motivating and filled with lessons on how to navigate challenges and avoid failure. Don't let this one sit on the shelf!

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Joyraj
A book that triggered my Thinking
Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2024
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A unique perspective to reading and indeed an author that made me think about the present & future in ways I had not imagined. Even though the books talks about Entrepreneurs, it is well designed to make any individual question their future and start thinking.

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Joshua Greenfield
Thanks for the food for thought, but the parts about monopolies seem fit only for a pre-utopian revised social contract.
Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2015
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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.

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Yrene
inspired
Reviewed in Canada on December 30, 2024
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It is inspired for me, especially the title. good advices for me who intend to be an entrepreneur. It also inspired me to think regarding my domain.

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Carlos Herrera
Sin duda un must read!
Reviewed in Mexico on July 23, 2024
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Para aquellas personas distintas que quieren tomar el camino del emprendimiento/negocios sin duda es un libro que debes de leer.

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Rogério V S Campos
One of the best
Reviewed in Brazil on July 28, 2023
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Different from all the cliche advices, truly gives you a clue on what is needed to build a billionaire business.

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Aiman Argal
Amazing Read
Reviewed in France on January 6, 2025
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Peter Thiel puts the main important points of building a startup in such a clear, concise and easy-to-read way

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Kashyap Gada
Great guiding, inspiration book!
Reviewed in India on November 30, 2024
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Been a collector of books from quite some time but hardly went past few pages of all the books I owned.

Then I heard someone say, if you don't like reading books, possibly you haven't found the right books yet.

Zero to One has been on my brother's bookshelf from quiet some time, I came across many recommendations that put this book at the top of their reading wishlist.

I competed it finally today and I must admit that bringing new products to life, reaching the singularity state is a religion in itself very few are aware of!

Highly recommended to any one who makes things for the world!

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Kashyap Gada

Great guiding, inspiration book!
Reviewed in India on November 30, 2024
Been a collector of books from quite some time but hardly went past few pages of all the books I owned.

Then I heard someone say, if you don't like reading books, possibly you haven't found the right books yet.

Zero to One has been on my brother's bookshelf from quiet some time, I came across many recommendations that put this book at the top of their reading wishlist.

I competed it finally today and I must admit that bringing new products to life, reaching the singularity state is a religion in itself very few are aware of!

Highly recommended to any one who makes things for the world!

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Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Hardcover – September 16, 2014

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5.0 out of 5 stars Thiel has more wise things to teach you than just crazy though brilliant visions.

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Main Point

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book and transaction!

5.0 out of 5 stars Complete this book at the earliest available opportunity.

5.0 out of 5 stars A book that triggered my Thinking

4.0 out of 5 stars Thanks for the food for thought, but the parts about monopolies seem fit only for a pre-utopian revised social contract.

Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars inspired

5.0 out of 5 stars Sin duda un must read!

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing Read

5.0 out of 5 stars Great guiding, inspiration book!

Thiel has more wise things to teach you than just crazy though brilliant visions.

Excellent Main Point

Excellent book and transaction!

Complete this book at the earliest available opportunity.

A book that triggered my Thinking

Thanks for the food for thought, but the parts about monopolies seem fit only for a pre-utopian revised social contract.

inspired

Sin duda un must read!

One of the best

Amazing Read

Great guiding, inspiration book!