Zero to One Quotes

“the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win. There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“If you can’t beat a rival, it may be better to merge.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“More than anything else, competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; and as a result, we trap ourselves within it—even though the more we compete, the less we gain.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Monopolists lie to protect themselves. They know that bragging about their great monopoly invites being audited, scrutinized, and attacked. 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.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“有時確實必須奮戰，遇到那種時候，你必須力抗到底並贏得勝利。沒有中庸之道，你要不就不要出拳，要不就猛力進攻，快速結束戰局。”
― Peter Thiel, 從0到1: 打開世界運作的未知祕密，在意想不到之處發現價值

“never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit—got us to the truth a lot faster. The best sales is hidden.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The total net profit that you earn on average over the course of your relationship with a customer (Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV) must exceed the amount you spend on average to acquire a new customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC).”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A great company is a conspiracy to change the world;”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking. Most people think only in terms of what they’ve been taught; schooling itself aims to impart conventional wisdom. So you might ask: are there any fields that matter but haven’t been standardized and institutionalized”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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

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

“faith in secrets. If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Very few people take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Fourth is “flatness.” As globalization advances, people perceive the world as one homogeneous, highly competitive marketplace: the world is “flat.” Given that assumption, anyone who might have had the ambition to look for a secret will first ask himself: if it were possible to discover something new, wouldn’t someone from the faceless global talent pool of smarter and more creative people have found it already?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“By definition, a secret hasn’t been vetted by the mainstream.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“At Founders Fund, we focus on five to seven companies in a fund, each of which we think could become a multibillion-dollar business based on its unique fundamentals.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In philosophy, politics, and business, too, arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, not the end itself.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“most new restaurants fail within one or two years,”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“After all, less than 1% of new businesses started each year in the U.S. receive venture funding, and total VC investment accounts for less than 0.2% of GDP. But the results of those investments disproportionately propel the entire economy. Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. They generate annual revenues equivalent to an astounding 21% of GDP. Indeed, the dozen largest tech companies were all venture-backed. Together those 12 companies are worth more than $2 trillion, more than all other tech companies combined.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done. That’s the only thing that can make its importance unique.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Startups don’t need to pay high salaries because they can offer something better: part ownership of the company itself. Equity is the one form of compensation that can effectively orient people toward creating value in the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future