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

by Blake Masters

Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today.

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.

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.

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.

There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley.

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

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.

Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.

Great