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

by Peter Thiel

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.

how can you reliably produce a constant stream of popular entertainment for a fickle audience? (Nobody knows.)

This quantum improvement was so effective that a very unhappy Barnes & Noble filed a lawsuit three days before Amazon’s IPO, claiming that Amazon was unfairly calling itself a “bookstore” when really it was a “book broker.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth.

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. Since information technology accelerated faster than ever during those same years, the big question for biotech today is whether it will ever see similar progress.