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Most misleadlingly the book bills itself as a handbook on how to build the next great startup. Of course this is an impossible t
on May 10, 2016
The author is a master entrepreneur and investor but as a writer I think he falls flat. I found myself skimming through the book to get to the juicier bits and even so there was really nothing substantial beyond the summaries I had read in others' book reviews. Most misleadlingly the book bills itself as a handbook on how to build the next great startup. Of course this is an impossible thing to do - if it was possible for any book to do this, that book would be the most valuable in the world. So not surprisingly it falls flat on this count and simply gives lists of some characteristics which can be observed in great startups. If you read any of the aforementioned book reviews, you probably got the gist of it already.
on March 7, 2017
This is an excellent book. Not many people can be entrepreneurs, but I believe this book could inspire many and it can certainly guide one to a more open-minded approach. Peter Thiel shows us that unconventional thinking (i.e. zero to one), is absolutely required to succeed with a new business. Conventional thinking (for instance that competition is unavoidable (if you have something proprietary a la apple, it IS AVOIDABLE) , that competition is wonderful and necessary {but actually it is NOT}), is the linear approach (go from 1 to 1.1). Conventional means copy others and when you do that you have to compete mainly by cutting prices. The leading businesses truly innovate (and everyone else follows or stay behind). I started reading a library copy but realized I want to own it because I have to read it slowly many times like a good wine. The copy that I received is in great condition; good deal, thanks!
on December 3, 2015
Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future by Blake Masters, Peter Thiel
The author of this book, Peter Thiel, started the worldwide, online payment system, PayPal, together with Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery and later Elon Musk. Thiel, a formidable intelligence, has pulled together an insider’s insights into building a startup that will add significantly to the business environment. While his focus is technology and “building the future”, his thoughts are relevant to any start up, in any field.
The Dot Com crash of 2000 led many to reconsider their thinking about creating new businesses. The euphoria of the Dot Com era was followed by huge losses, and a sobering of the irrational enthusiasm. However, the lessons many learned from this fall were the wrong ones, says Thiel, and they could easily mislead future entrepreneurs. These “lessons” included the warning that anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble; the future is unknowable so do not make plans; build on what others have already achieved; and so on.
The opposite of this timidity is probably more correct, Thiel believes. It is better in every way to risk boldness than to make only slight, trivial, changes to what has already proven to be successful. While the future cannot be known with certainty, it isclearly better to plan than to have no plan.
During the Dot Com bubble, there was an unbridled belief in the value of products with little or no significant thought given to the sales and distribution of these products. “Sales matters just as much as product”: we learned the hard way.
When hiring new staff, Thiel explains, he asks candidates what contrarian idea they hold that no-one else seems to believe. That contrarian idea is also applicable to companies: “What valuable company is nobody building?” This is a powerful starting point for any start-up.
To this value-adding benefit to people, the accompanying question should be added, “How much value can I keep from this company?” Thiel compares U.S. airline companies to Google to illustrate this point. Google’s revenues in 2012 were one third those of the airlines at $50b, but made 21% of those revenues as profits compared to the airlines’ 0.002%.
Monopolies have a bad reputation. While they dominate, they draw excessive profits for shareholders, (very good,) but hurt consumers, which is why they are always under attack by regulators. Thiel favours monopolies, not of the kind that are protected by legislation, rather those that achieve this status because they are so good at what they do.
However, those who accept Thiel’s view of “good” monopolies often delude themselves with the “We’re in a league of our own” deception. Too often start-ups are in a league of their own, but the league is so small that dominating it is not financially viable.
If you are not significantly different to your competitors you will always struggle to survive. The only way to avoid this daily struggle, Thiel suggests, is to produce the profits that a monopoly commands. This is no easy matter because in a dynamic business environment, it is always possible for your competitors to invent new and better offerings. “Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world,” Thiel explains.
Creative monopolies are not only good for society, it is they who make the future so much better than the past.
There is a set of characteristics that is shared by all creative monopolies. The proprietary technologies these companies hold must be very difficult to replicate and provide a substantive advantage – they must be “at least 10 times better.” Google’s algorithms produce results 10 times more efficiently than any other search engine. Amazon has in excess of 10 times as many books as any other bookstore.
A further characteristic of creative monopolies is their network effect. This effect makes the product more useful as more people use it. What is paradoxical is that these businesses must be valuable to the few first users in order for the business to survive. Recall that Facebook started with Harvard students to whom it offered value.
A software startup has the additional advantage of dramatic economies of scale because the marginal cost of expansion is close to zero.
Branding has always been, and remains an important characteristic of any creative monopoly. However, as we have seen clearly from the outrageously successful Apple products, the branding has to be substantive, not an add-on. Their products are fundamentally better.
Thiel’s book on building successful startups holds far more valuable insights than I could possibly include in a column. Nissim Taleb, (author of The Black Swan,) put it succinctly: '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.'
Readability Light ---+- Serious
Insights High +---- Low
Practical High --+-- Low
The author of this book, Peter Thiel, started the worldwide, online payment system, PayPal, together with Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery and later Elon Musk. Thiel, a formidable intelligence, has pulled together an insider’s insights into building a startup that will add significantly to the business environment. While his focus is technology and “building the future”, his thoughts are relevant to any start up, in any field.
The Dot Com crash of 2000 led many to reconsider their thinking about creating new businesses. The euphoria of the Dot Com era was followed by huge losses, and a sobering of the irrational enthusiasm. However, the lessons many learned from this fall were the wrong ones, says Thiel, and they could easily mislead future entrepreneurs. These “lessons” included the warning that anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble; the future is unknowable so do not make plans; build on what others have already achieved; and so on.
The opposite of this timidity is probably more correct, Thiel believes. It is better in every way to risk boldness than to make only slight, trivial, changes to what has already proven to be successful. While the future cannot be known with certainty, it isclearly better to plan than to have no plan.
During the Dot Com bubble, there was an unbridled belief in the value of products with little or no significant thought given to the sales and distribution of these products. “Sales matters just as much as product”: we learned the hard way.
When hiring new staff, Thiel explains, he asks candidates what contrarian idea they hold that no-one else seems to believe. That contrarian idea is also applicable to companies: “What valuable company is nobody building?” This is a powerful starting point for any start-up.
To this value-adding benefit to people, the accompanying question should be added, “How much value can I keep from this company?” Thiel compares U.S. airline companies to Google to illustrate this point. Google’s revenues in 2012 were one third those of the airlines at $50b, but made 21% of those revenues as profits compared to the airlines’ 0.002%.
Monopolies have a bad reputation. While they dominate, they draw excessive profits for shareholders, (very good,) but hurt consumers, which is why they are always under attack by regulators. Thiel favours monopolies, not of the kind that are protected by legislation, rather those that achieve this status because they are so good at what they do.
However, those who accept Thiel’s view of “good” monopolies often delude themselves with the “We’re in a league of our own” deception. Too often start-ups are in a league of their own, but the league is so small that dominating it is not financially viable.
If you are not significantly different to your competitors you will always struggle to survive. The only way to avoid this daily struggle, Thiel suggests, is to produce the profits that a monopoly commands. This is no easy matter because in a dynamic business environment, it is always possible for your competitors to invent new and better offerings. “Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world,” Thiel explains.
Creative monopolies are not only good for society, it is they who make the future so much better than the past.
There is a set of characteristics that is shared by all creative monopolies. The proprietary technologies these companies hold must be very difficult to replicate and provide a substantive advantage – they must be “at least 10 times better.” Google’s algorithms produce results 10 times more efficiently than any other search engine. Amazon has in excess of 10 times as many books as any other bookstore.
A further characteristic of creative monopolies is their network effect. This effect makes the product more useful as more people use it. What is paradoxical is that these businesses must be valuable to the few first users in order for the business to survive. Recall that Facebook started with Harvard students to whom it offered value.
A software startup has the additional advantage of dramatic economies of scale because the marginal cost of expansion is close to zero.
Branding has always been, and remains an important characteristic of any creative monopoly. However, as we have seen clearly from the outrageously successful Apple products, the branding has to be substantive, not an add-on. Their products are fundamentally better.
Thiel’s book on building successful startups holds far more valuable insights than I could possibly include in a column. Nissim Taleb, (author of The Black Swan,) put it succinctly: '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.'
Readability Light ---+- Serious
Insights High +---- Low
Practical High --+-- Low
on February 28, 2016
Have you ever read an article or book that defined something that you’ve abstractly believed for years? When you read it you let out an affirmative mental “aha!”. I had one of these moments recently when I read Zero to One by Peter Thiel. This book helped shape and better define my investment strategy.
Far too often I see a microcap company’s investor presentation start off with some enormous addressable market ($20 billion, $100 billion, etc) and what follows is “If we just capture 2%….”. This has always annoyed me because in many ways the worst thing an undercapitalized public microcap can do is try to attack a huge highly competitive market.
In Zero to One, Peter Thiel talks about how small emerging companies/and investors need to take the opposite approach. In simple terms, aim for monopoly, competition is for losers. Monopolies have far greater profits, pricing power, and ability to think long-term. For small companies like microcaps to be a monopoly they need to focus on dominating a small market that is expanding, and then further grow into other complimentary markets. “Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away.” When a company dominates a market (large or small) it is much more profitable and valuable then one owning 1% of a large competitive market.
When I look back at some of the best microcap performers they too had this characteristic of dominating a small market that is expanding rapidly. These companies normally have high organic growth rates, profitability, and pricing power. These powerhouse businesses can fund high rates of growth from internal cash flows. Their market leadership and profitability allows them to make longer-term strategic decisions that provide an even wider moat.
Far too often I see a microcap company’s investor presentation start off with some enormous addressable market ($20 billion, $100 billion, etc) and what follows is “If we just capture 2%….”. This has always annoyed me because in many ways the worst thing an undercapitalized public microcap can do is try to attack a huge highly competitive market.
In Zero to One, Peter Thiel talks about how small emerging companies/and investors need to take the opposite approach. In simple terms, aim for monopoly, competition is for losers. Monopolies have far greater profits, pricing power, and ability to think long-term. For small companies like microcaps to be a monopoly they need to focus on dominating a small market that is expanding, and then further grow into other complimentary markets. “Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away.” When a company dominates a market (large or small) it is much more profitable and valuable then one owning 1% of a large competitive market.
When I look back at some of the best microcap performers they too had this characteristic of dominating a small market that is expanding rapidly. These companies normally have high organic growth rates, profitability, and pricing power. These powerhouse businesses can fund high rates of growth from internal cash flows. Their market leadership and profitability allows them to make longer-term strategic decisions that provide an even wider moat.
Thanks for the food for thought, but the parts about monopolies seem fit only for a pre-utopian revised social contract.
on March 5, 2015
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.
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.
on June 16, 2016
Really solid treatise on how to create REAL innovation.
Upside: A really solid book by an accomplished entrepreneur and investor (one of the PayPal founders).
Downside: The Audiobook https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/B00M284NY2 was read by a nearly unlistenable voice (God, I hope that's not you, Peter Thiel!).
But the content cuts through.
I had to take a HyperFocus DRIVE. The Ultimate Solution for FOCUS and MOTIVATION. just to keep my mind from going into a monotone listening coma (think Ben Stein, but without the personality. Or cool glasses).
If you're a true innovator or inventor, you will find yourself nodding all the way through this book as Thiel exposes the differences between Innovation and Raw Creation.
He also sets out the Rules for Revolutionaries and Guideposts for Success.
Ignore these at your own risk.
A must-read for any entrepreneur who wants to make a difference.
Upside: A really solid book by an accomplished entrepreneur and investor (one of the PayPal founders).
Downside: The Audiobook https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/B00M284NY2 was read by a nearly unlistenable voice (God, I hope that's not you, Peter Thiel!).
But the content cuts through.
I had to take a HyperFocus DRIVE. The Ultimate Solution for FOCUS and MOTIVATION. just to keep my mind from going into a monotone listening coma (think Ben Stein, but without the personality. Or cool glasses).
If you're a true innovator or inventor, you will find yourself nodding all the way through this book as Thiel exposes the differences between Innovation and Raw Creation.
He also sets out the Rules for Revolutionaries and Guideposts for Success.
Ignore these at your own risk.
A must-read for any entrepreneur who wants to make a difference.
on December 23, 2015
This is essentially a pamphlet of Thiel’s entrepreneurial creed manifesto. The book vacillates between banal elaboration of truisms and well articulated retelling of business philosophies based on economic and strategic theories. The book makes me shift between a feeling that it was written as a rabble rousing manifesto for the California ecosystem of startup crazy individuals and a true preponderance and clarion call for building a better future.
There are two groups of people who will love this book
1> The business school educated ones who will smile and connect the dots between theories they’re taught and how Peter’s elaborate essays philosophize and story tell much of what they’ve learnt in their economics, business history and strategy courses.
2> The anti-MBA crowd that has read little about business and prefers anecdotes with simplified clarion calls and crisp statements that can easily be converted into some form of ‘Just do it’ mantra.
Being contrarian and libertarian, Thiel’s motivations are transparent and biases visible through the book. In trying to assemble a few hypotheses , especially w.r.t to social psychology and philosophy, Peter runs into the risk of over-simplifications and straw-man arguments. But in a ‘maker-builder’ world, all arguments have to be translated from complex interconnecting theories into metamodels prendre le parti.
If you want to think contrarian, a better guide is Steven Sample’s book, a book that is littered with inconsistencies and factual incorrectness but does a great job of making the case for contrarian thinking. If you want understand innovation or strategy, there are tomes by business school professors like Porter and Christensen. If you want to understand entrepreneurial ecosystem, you are better off reading George Gilder. Thiel is not an academic , journalist or a philosopher though his writing style can sometimes come across as a strange hybrid of those, especially when it starts going off into tangents.
The book title includes the word, ‘Notes’ , so I approached it less like an elaborately researched tome and more like a conversational engagement by a man who has had some success in the Silicon valley business ecosystem. Don't expect the anything earth shattering, piece together the parts of puzzle that he sees and you'll enjoy the ride. It is safe to say that Thiel achieves success in engaging those who are predisposed but not yet motivated to seeking future on their own terms.
There are two groups of people who will love this book
1> The business school educated ones who will smile and connect the dots between theories they’re taught and how Peter’s elaborate essays philosophize and story tell much of what they’ve learnt in their economics, business history and strategy courses.
2> The anti-MBA crowd that has read little about business and prefers anecdotes with simplified clarion calls and crisp statements that can easily be converted into some form of ‘Just do it’ mantra.
Being contrarian and libertarian, Thiel’s motivations are transparent and biases visible through the book. In trying to assemble a few hypotheses , especially w.r.t to social psychology and philosophy, Peter runs into the risk of over-simplifications and straw-man arguments. But in a ‘maker-builder’ world, all arguments have to be translated from complex interconnecting theories into metamodels prendre le parti.
If you want to think contrarian, a better guide is Steven Sample’s book, a book that is littered with inconsistencies and factual incorrectness but does a great job of making the case for contrarian thinking. If you want understand innovation or strategy, there are tomes by business school professors like Porter and Christensen. If you want to understand entrepreneurial ecosystem, you are better off reading George Gilder. Thiel is not an academic , journalist or a philosopher though his writing style can sometimes come across as a strange hybrid of those, especially when it starts going off into tangents.
The book title includes the word, ‘Notes’ , so I approached it less like an elaborately researched tome and more like a conversational engagement by a man who has had some success in the Silicon valley business ecosystem. Don't expect the anything earth shattering, piece together the parts of puzzle that he sees and you'll enjoy the ride. It is safe to say that Thiel achieves success in engaging those who are predisposed but not yet motivated to seeking future on their own terms.
on May 13, 2017
I read this because lots of super-successful people from Tools of Titans recommended it. It was a great decision. Lots of very straightforward, practical advice from someone who has been closely involved with or responsible for some majorly successful tech companies.
Many of the things he says run counter to some conventional "lean start-up" accepted wisdom. Given his pedigree and the success of the PayPal Mafia, I confide in him over them.
I am in the process of starting a tech start-up, and am incredibly happy I read this. If things go the way that I anticipate and hope, I plan on thanking Mr. Thiel one day for writing this book and inspiring me to take the course I did.
Many of the things he says run counter to some conventional "lean start-up" accepted wisdom. Given his pedigree and the success of the PayPal Mafia, I confide in him over them.
I am in the process of starting a tech start-up, and am incredibly happy I read this. If things go the way that I anticipate and hope, I plan on thanking Mr. Thiel one day for writing this book and inspiring me to take the course I did.
on March 11, 2017
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future There are some interesting ideas in the book, but a lot of vague mumbling. It's better to dominate a sector then to be a small player in a crowded market. Okay... Have a game plan. Make sure to have some business knowledge. Have an advantage. Nothing that strikes me as being so unique in knowledge that one should ever pay full price for this slim volume. If you can pick it up on sale or in a more affordable format, it's worth the read but for people who have such an interesting background behind them, the vagueness hints at a magician's show act.
