Zero to One Quotes

“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

“Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced. You need people who are not just skilled on paper but who will work together cohesively after they’re hired.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your time well—even in purely financial terms.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Anyone who prefers owning a part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company’s value in the future. Equity can’t create perfect incentives, but it’s the best way for a founder to keep everyone in the company broadly aligned.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“it’s useful to distinguish between three concepts: • Ownership: who legally owns a company’s equity? • Possession: who actually runs the company on a day-to-day basis? • Control: who formally governs the company’s affairs?”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“In economics, disbelief in secrets leads to faith in efficient markets. But the existence of financial bubbles shows that markets can have extraordinary inefficiencies. (And the more people believe in efficiency, the bigger the bubbles get.)”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“In the modern religion of environmentalism, the easy truth is that we must protect the environment. Beyond that, Mother Nature knows best, and she cannot be questioned. Free marketeers worship a similar logic. The value of things is set by the market.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a “minimum viable product,” and iterate our way to success. But 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.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“progress without planning is what we call “evolution.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Definite optimism works when you build the future you envision. Definite pessimism works by building what can be copied without expecting anything new. Indefinite pessimism works because it’s self-fulfilling: if you’re a slacker with low expectations, they’ll probably be met. But indefinite optimism seems inherently unsustainable: how can the future get better if no one plans for it?”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“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. Anything less than an order of magnitude better will probably be perceived as a marginal improvement and will be hard to sell, especially in an already crowded market.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future