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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Thiel
Read between
March 24 - April 3, 2020
if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.
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.
the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.
Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.
proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.
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.
network effects businesses must start with especially small markets.
A good startup should have the potential for great scale built into its first design.
No technology company can be built on branding alone.
Start Small and Monopolize
The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.
Scaling Up
Don’t Disrupt
THE LAST WILL BE FIRST
the phenomenon of serial entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of chance.
“Success is never accidental.”
No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball.
Optimists welcome the future; pessimists fear it.
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.
The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.
If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it.
competition and capitalism are opposites.
a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
the higher the price of your product, the more you have to spend to make a sale—and the more it makes sense to spend it.
Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor.
When a cheap laptop beats the smartest mathematicians at some tasks but even a supercomputer with 16,000 CPUs can’t beat a child at others, you can tell that humans and computers are not just more or less powerful than each other—they’re categorically different.
they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?
The Engineering Question
The Timing Question
The Monopoly Question
The People Question
The Distribution Question
The Durability Question
The Secret Question
The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme; we need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.
The lesson for founders is that individual prominence and adulation can never be enjoyed except on the condition that it may be exchanged for individual notoriety and demonization at any moment—so
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.
