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

by Blake Masters

first principles instead of formulas.

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).

“irrational exuberance” might have “unduly escalated asset values.”

You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.

encomium

In 1906, economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered what became the “Pareto principle,” or the 80-20 rule, when he noticed that 20% of the people owned 80% of the land in Italy—a phenomenon that he found just as natural as the fact that 20% of the peapods in his garden produced 80% of the peas. This

Luddites

These are the roots of monarchy: every king was a living god, and every god a murdered king. Perhaps every modern king is just a scapegoat who has managed to delay his own execution.

Hughes was “a man to whom you cannot apply the same standards as you can to you and me,” his lawyer once argued in federal court. Hughes paid the lawyer to say that, but according to the New York Times there was “no dispute on this point from judge or jury.”