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

by Blake Masters

an indefinitely optimistic future calls for more bankers and lawyers.

even inside finance, everything is indefinite. It’s still optimistic—you wouldn’t play in the markets if you expected to lose—but the fundamental tenet is that the market is random; you can’t know anything specific or substantive; diversification becomes supremely important.

At no point does anyone in the chain know what to do with money in the real economy. But in an indefinite world, people actually prefer unlimited optionality; money is more valuable than anything you could possibly do with it. Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, not the end itself.

entitlement spending has eclipsed discretionary spending every year since 1975.

To increase discretionary spending we’d need definite plans to solve specific problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending, we can make things better just by sending out more checks.

The philosophy of the ancient world was pessimistic: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Lucretius all accepted strict limits on human potential.

expected material advances to fundamentally change human life for the better: they were definite optimists.

fair political reasoning is supposed to be impossible for anyone with knowledge of the world as it concretely exists.

In philosophy, politics, and business, too, arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.

Whether through geographic exploration or laboratory research, the best minds of the Renaissance thought of death as something to defeat.

Systematic knowledge of the current range of human lifespans has made that range seem natural. Today our society is permeated by the twin ideas that death is both inevitable and random.

Eroom’s law—that’s Moore’s law backward—observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950.

Biotech startups are an extreme example of indefinite thinking. Researchers experiment with things that just might work instead of refining definite theories about how the body’s systems operate. Biologists say they need to work this way because the underlying biology is hard. According to them, IT startups work because we created computers ourselves and designed them to reliably obey our commands. Biotech is difficult because we didn’t design our bodies, and the more we learn about them, the more complex they turn out to be.