Zero to One Quotes

“they turn out to be right, they take a cut of the returns—usually 20%.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“As of May 2014, it owns about 68% of the search market. (Its closest competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo!, have about 19% and 10%, respectively.) If that doesn’t seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word “google” is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—as a verb. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen to Bing.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Nerds are used to transparency. They add value by becoming expert at a technical skill like computer programming. In engineering disciplines, a solution either works or it fails. You can evaluate someone else’s work with relative ease, as surface appearances don’t matter much. Sales is the opposite: an orchestrated campaign to change surface appearances without changing the underlying reality. This strikes engineers as trivial if not fundamentally dishonest. They know their own jobs are hard, so when they look at salespeople laughing on the phone with a customer or going to two-hour lunches, they suspect that no real work is being done. If anything, people overestimate the relative difficulty of science and engineering, because the challenges of those fields are obvious. What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, 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).”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, 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?”
― Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits. The way to do that is to dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision.”
― Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.”
― Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“life for the worse. Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new. It’s hard to say how much would be different, but the opportunity costs were enormous. All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Stanford Law School, where I competed even harder for the standard badges of success. The highest prize in a law student’s world is unambiguous: out of tens of thousands of graduates each year, only a few dozen get a Supreme Court clerkship. After clerking on a federal appeals court for a year, I was invited to interview for clerkships with Justices Kennedy and Scalia. My meetings with the Justices went well. I was so close to winning this last competition. If only I got the clerkship, I thought, I would be set for life. But I didn’t. At the time, I was devastated. In 2004, after I had built and sold PayPal, I ran into an old friend from law school who had helped me prepare my failed clerkship applications. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. His first question wasn’t “How are you doing?” or “Can you believe it’s been so long?” Instead, he grinned and asked: “So, Peter, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that clerkship?” With the benefit of hindsight, we both knew that winning that ultimate competition would have changed my”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If you do start your own company, you must remember the power law to operate it well. The most important things are singular: One market will probably be better than all others, as we discussed in Chapter 5. One distribution strategy usually dominates all others, too—for that see Chapter 11. Time and decision-making themselves follow a power law, and some moments matter far more than others—see Chapter 9. However, you can’t trust a world that denies the power law to accurately frame your decisions for you, so what’s most important is rarely obvious. It might even be secret. But in a power law world, you can’t afford not to think hard about where your actions will fall on the curve.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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

“When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he didn’t just make Apple a cool place to work; he slashed product lines to focus on the handful of opportunities for 10x improvements.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“that’s”
― 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