Zero to One Quotes

“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

“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

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

“If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“leanness is a methodology, not a goal.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“no seas disruptivo: evita la competencia todo lo posible.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“No deberías saber lo que tu negocio hará en el futuro; la planificación es arrogante e inflexible.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“Los teléfonos inteligentes que nos distraen de nuestro entorno también nos distraen del hecho de que nuestro entorno es extrañamente arcaico:”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

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

“Haz progresos graduales Las grandes visiones inflaron la burbuja, de modo que no deberían consentirse. Cualquiera que afirme ser capaz de hacer algo grande es sospechoso, y cualquiera que quiera”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?—is difficult to answer directly. It may be easier to start with a preliminary: what does everybody agree on? “Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad). If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Every company starts in unique circumstances, and every company starts only once. Statistics doesn’t work when the sample size is one.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“people then products then traffic then revenue.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“(To properly value a business, you also have to discount those future cash flows to their present worth, since a given amount of money today is worth more than the same amount in the future.)”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world. These are the kind of elementary truths we teach to second graders, but they are easy to forget in a world where so much of what we do is repeat what has been done before.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future