Zero to One Quotes

“techniques for polishing the surface don’t work without a strong underlying substance. Apple has a complex suite of proprietary technologies, both in hardware (like superior touchscreen materials) and software (like touchscreen interfaces purpose-designed for specific materials).”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“If you build something valuable where there was nothing before, the increase in value is theoretically infinite.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“They often lose money for the first few years: it takes time to build valuable things, and that means delayed revenue.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Simply stated, 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

“If you can recognize competition as a destructive force instead of a sign of value, you’re already more sane than most.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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

“Every university believes in "excellence," and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that "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. p90.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Always err on the side of starting too small.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If we define the future as a time that looks different from the present, then most people aren’t expecting any future at all; instead, they expect coming decades to bring more globalization, convergence, and sameness.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“People don’t just compete to supply labor; they also demand the same resources. While American consumers have benefited from access to cheap toys and textiles from China, they’ve had to pay higher prices for the gasoline newly desired by millions of Chinese motorists.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Max Levchin, my co-founder at PayPal, says that startups should make their early staff as personally similar as possible. Startups have limited resources and small teams. They must work quickly and efficiently in order to survive, and that’s easier to do when everyone shares an understanding of the world.”
― 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. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. 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

“In the 1950s, Americans thought big plans for the future were too important to be left to experts.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, 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.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“So why are economists obsessed with competition as an ideal state? It’s a relic of history. Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century physicists: they see individuals and businesses as interchangeable atoms, not as unique creators. Their theories describe an equilibrium state of perfect competition because that’s what’s easy to model, not because it represents the best of business. But it’s worth recalling that the long-run equilibrium predicted by 19th-century physics was a state in which all energy is evenly distributed and everything comes to rest—also known as the heat death of the universe. Whatever your views on thermodynamics, it’s a powerful metaphor: in business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Non-monopolists exaggerate their distinction by defining their market as the intersection of various smaller markets: British food ∩ restaurant ∩ Palo Alto Rap star ∩ hackers ∩ sharks Monopolists, by contrast, disguise their monopoly by framing their market as the union of several large markets: search engine ∪ mobile phones ∪ wearable computers ∪ self-driving cars”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“On February 16, 2000, the Wall Street Journal ran a story lauding our viral growth and suggesting that PayPal was worth $500 million. When we raised $100 million the next month, our lead investor took the Journal’s back-of-the-envelope valuation as authoritative. (Other investors were in even more of a hurry. A South Korean firm wired us $5 million without first negotiating a deal or signing any documents. When I tried to return the money, they wouldn’t tell me where to send it.)”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“our surroundings are strangely old: only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Those who succumb to measurement mania obsess about weekly active user statistics, monthly revenue targets, and quarterly earnings reports. However, you can hit those numbers and still overlook deeper, harder-to-measure problems that threaten the durability of your business.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Definite Pessimism A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today. When Americans see the Chinese economy grow ferociously fast (10% per year since 2000), we imagine a confident country mastering its future. But that’s because Americans are still optimists, and we project our optimism onto China. From China’s viewpoint, economic growth cannot come fast enough. Every other country is afraid that China is going to take over the world; China is the only country afraid that it won’t. China can grow so fast only because its starting base is so low. The easiest way for China to grow is to relentlessly copy what has already worked in the West. And that’s exactly what it’s doing: executing definite plans by burning ever more coal to build ever more factories and skyscrapers. But with a huge population pushing resource prices higher, there’s no way Chinese living standards can ever actually catch up to those of the richest countries, and the Chinese know it. This is why the Chinese leadership is obsessed with the way in which things threaten to get worse. Every senior Chinese leader experienced famine as a child, so when the Politburo looks to the future, disaster is not an abstraction. The Chinese public, too, knows that winter is coming. Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.” 6”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If you build something valuable where there was nothing before, the increase
in value is theoretically infinite”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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

“Conventional beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble. But the distortions caused by bubbles don’t disappear when they pop.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. 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. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. 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. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future