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

by Peter Thiel

Today’s “best practices” lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.

In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.

Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away.

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

Every individual is unavoidably an investor, too. When you choose a career, you act on your belief that the kind of work you do will be valuable decades from now.

The more you dabble, the more you are supposed to have hedged against the uncertainty of the future.

EVERY ONE OF TODAY’S most famous and familiar ideas was once unknown and unsuspected.

Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization. If you want that kind of free rein from your board, blow it up to giant size. If you want an effective board, keep it small.

But even so-called incentive pay encourages short-term thinking and value grabbing. Any kind of cash is more about the present than the future.

everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.

On the inside, every individual should be sharply distinguished by her work.

When assigning responsibilities to employees in a startup, you could start by treating it as a simple optimization problem to efficiently match talents with tasks.

People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

Who makes an effective scapegoat? Like founders, scapegoats are extreme and contradictory figures. On the one hand, a scapegoat is necessarily weak; he is powerless to stop his own victimization. On the other hand, as the one who can defuse conflict by taking the blame, he is the most powerful member of the community.

The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.