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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Thiel
Read between
May 22 - June 3, 2018
The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.
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.
The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.
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.
...in the negative
If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.
...in the negative
If the tendency of monopoly businesses were to hold back progress, they would be dangerous and we’d be right to oppose them. But the history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents.
Monopolies drive progress because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate.
Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
end game
All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.
But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.
radical contradiction towards conventional wisdom
As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements.
algorithmic vs. heuristic based work
Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way.
