Zero to One Quotes

“This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Like acting, sales works best when hidden.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“You could have 100% of the equity if you fully fund your own venture, but if it fails you’ll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable (more than $35 million as of this writing).”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Doing something different is what’s truly good for society—and it’s also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“No company has a culture, every company is a culture”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“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

“The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“the history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Consider a statement from Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s testimony at a 2011 congressional hearing: We face an extremely competitive landscape in which consumers have a multitude of options to access information. Or, translated from PR-speak to plain English: Google is a small fish in a big pond. We could be swallowed whole at any time. We are not the monopoly that the government is looking for.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Since they very much want their monopoly profits to continue unmolested, they tend to do whatever they can to conceal their monopoly—usually by exaggerating the power of their (nonexistent) competition.”
― 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