Zero to One Quotes

“The same reason that so many internet companies, including Facebook, are often underestimated—their very simplicity—is itself an argument for secrets. If insights that look so elementary in retrospect can support important and valuable businesses, there must remain many great companies still to start.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The actual truth is that there are many more secrets left to find, but they will yield only to relentless searchers. There is more to do in science, medicine, engineering, and in technology of all kinds. We are within reach not just of marginal goals set at the competitive edge of today’s conventional disciplines, but of ambitions so great that even the boldest minds of the Scientific Revolution hesitated to announce them directly.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“You can’t find secrets without looking for them.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Recall the business version of our contrarian question: what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world-changing companies yet to be started.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“But no matter how unambiguous the end result of the power law, it doesn’t reflect daily experience. Since investors spend most of their time making new investments and attending to companies in their early stages, most of the companies they work with are by definition average. Most of the differences that investors and entrepreneurs perceive every day are between relative levels of success, not between exponential dominance and failure. And since nobody wants to give up on an investment, VCs usually spend even more time on the most problematic companies than they do on the most obviously successful.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined. This implies two very strange rules for VCs. First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. This is a scary rule, because it eliminates the vast majority of possible investments. (Even quite successful companies usually succeed on a more humble scale.) This leads to rule number two: because rule number one is so restrictive, there can’t be any other rules.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“venture returns don’t follow a normal distribution overall. Rather, they follow a power law: a small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively. Forget “minimum viable products”—ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“It’s true that every great entrepreneur is first and foremost a designer.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Even in engineering-driven Silicon Valley, the buzzwords of the moment call for building a “lean startup” that can “adapt” and “evolve” to an ever-changing environment. 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.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“progress without planning is what we call “evolution.” Darwin himself wrote that life tends to “progress” without anybody intending it. Every living thing is just a random iteration on some other organism, and the best iterations win.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Whether through geographic exploration or laboratory research, the best minds of the Renaissance thought of death as something to defeat.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“It’s no surprise that entitlement spending has eclipsed discretionary spending every year since 1975. To increase discretionary spending we’d need definite plans to solve specific problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending, we can make things better just by sending out more checks.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks’ time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like 10 or 20 years from now. And”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“At no point does anyone in the chain know what to do with money in the real economy. But in an indefinite world, people actually prefer unlimited optionality; money is more valuable than anything you could possibly do with it. Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, not the end itself.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“While a definitely optimistic future would need engineers to design underwater cities and settlements in space, an indefinitely optimistic future calls for more bankers and lawyers. Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. If they don’t go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Instead of working for years to build a new product, indefinite optimists rearrange already-invented ones. Bankers make money by rearranging the capital structures of already existing companies.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“To an indefinite optimist, the future will be better, but he doesn’t know how exactly, so he won’t make any specific plans. He expects to profit from the future but sees no reason to design it concretely.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“PayPal could be seen as disruptive, but we didn’t try to directly challenge any large competitor. It’s true that we took some business away from Visa when we popularized internet payments: you might use PayPal to buy something online instead of using your Visa card to buy it in a store. But since we expanded the market for payments overall, we gave Visa far more business than we took. The overall dynamic was net positive, unlike Napster’s negative-sum struggle with the U.S. recording industry. As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Sometimes there are hidden obstacles to scaling—a lesson that eBay has learned in recent years. Like all marketplaces, the auction marketplace lent itself to natural monopoly because buyers go where the sellers are and vice versa. But eBay found that the auction model works best for individually distinctive products like coins and stamps. It works less well for commodity products: people don’t want to bid on pencils or Kleenex, so it’s more convenient just to buy them from Amazon. eBay is still a valuable monopoly; it’s just smaller than people in 2004 expected it to be.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos’s founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, 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. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Every startup is small at the start. Every monopoly dominates a large share of its market. Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. The reason is simple: it’s easier to dominate a small market than a large one. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.”
― 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. No technology company can be built on branding alone.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“monopoly business gets stronger as it gets bigger: the fixed costs of creating a product (engineering, management, office space) can be spread out over ever greater quantities of sales.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Their technology probably would have worked at scale, but it could have worked only at scale: it required every computer to join the network at the same time, and that was never going to happen. Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Proprietary technology is the most substantive advantage a company can have because it makes your product difficult or impossible to replicate. Google’s search algorithms, for example, return results better than anyone else’s.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future