Zero to One Quotes

“It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything I’ve learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend. This got us hundreds of thousands of new customers and an exponential growth rate.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In October 2010, a startup called Square released a small, white, square-shaped product that let anyone with an iPhone swipe and accept credit cards. It was the first good payment processing solution for mobile handsets. Imitators promptly sprang into action. A Canadian company called NetSecure launched its own card reader in a half-moon shape. Intuit brought a cylindrical reader to the geometric battle. In March 2012, eBay’s PayPal unit launched its own copycat card reader. It was shaped like a triangle—a clear jab at Square, as three sides are simpler than four. One gets the sense that this Shakespearean saga won’t end until the apes run out of shapes.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Professors downplay the cutthroat culture of academia, but managers never tire of comparing business to war. MBA students carry around copies of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war: allegedly necessary, supposedly valiant, but ultimately destructive.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“There are two kinds of secrets: secrets of nature and secrets about people. Natural secrets exist all around us; to find them, one must study some undiscovered aspect of the physical world. Secrets about people are different: they are things that people don’t know about themselves or things they hide because they don’t want others to know. So when thinking about what kind of company to build, there are two distinct questions to ask: What secrets is nature not telling you? What secrets are people not telling you?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Secrets about people are relatively underappreciated. Maybe that’s because you don’t need a dozen years of higher education to ask the questions that uncover them: What are people not allowed to talk about? What is forbidden or taboo?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?—”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Only when your product is 10x better can you offer the customer transparent superiority.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“contrarian”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“the more we compete, the less we gain.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous. Ever”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at the stake.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Palantir, the second-best investment, is set to return more than the sum of every other investment aside from Facebook. This highly uneven pattern is not unusual:”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Non-monopolists tell the opposite lie: “we’re in a league of our own.” Entrepreneurs are always biased to understate the scale of competition, but that is the biggest mistake a startup can make. The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“what valuable company is nobody building?”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly. Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“cuando Twitter salió a bolsa en 2013, se valoró en 24.000 millones de dólares —doce veces más el valor de la capitalización de mercado de Times—, y todo pese a que Times facturó 133 millones de dólares en 2012 mientras que Twitter perdió dinero.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“(Por lo general, se considera raro que un universitario tenga cuarenta años. Por lo general, se considera una locura crear media decena de compañías a la vez. Pero a finales de la década de los noventa, la gente podía pensar que se trataba de una combinación ganadora.)”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“quixotic”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“the knowledge underlying civilization is so widespread today that complete annihilation would be more probable than a long period of darkness followed by recovery.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build 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.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future