Zero to One Quotes

“What does a company with large cash flows far into the future look like? Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The overwhelming importance of future profits is counterintuitive even in Silicon Valley. For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. 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

“The hazards of imitative competition may partially explain why individuals with an Asperger’s-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today. If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you. If you’re interested in making things or programming computers, you’ll be less afraid to pursue those activities single-mindedly and thereby become incredibly good at them.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The dynamism of new monopolies itself explains why old monopolies don’t strangle innovation. With Apple’s iOS at the forefront, the rise of mobile computing has dramatically reduced Microsoft’s decades-long operating system dominance. Before that, IBM’s hardware monopoly of the ’60s and ’70s was overtaken by Microsoft’s software monopoly. AT&T had a monopoly on telephone service for most of the 20th century, but now anyone can get a cheap cell phone plan from any number of providers.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Monopolies drive progress because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate. Then monopolies can keep innovating because profits enable them to make the long-term plans and to finance the ambitious research projects that firms locked in competition can’t dream of.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If the tendency of monopoly businesses were to hold back progress, they would be dangerous and we’d be right to oppose them. But the history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“But the world we live in is dynamic: it’s possible to invent new and better things. Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society; they’re powerful engines for making it better.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“that is the biggest mistake a startup can make. The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“To an economist, every monopoly looks the same, whether it deviously eliminates rivals, secures a license from the state, or innovates its way to the top. In this book, we’re not interested in illegal bullies or government favorites: by “monopoly,” we mean the kind of company that’s so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute. Google is a good example of a company that went from 0 to 1: it hasn’t competed in search since the early 2000s, when it definitively distanced itself from Microsoft and Yahoo!”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“THE BUSINESS VERSION of our contrarian question is: what valuable company is nobody building? This question is harder than it looks, because your company could create a lot of value without becoming very valuable itself. Creating value is not enough—you also need to capture some of the value you create.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“principles are probably more correct: 1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality. 2. A bad plan is better than no plan. 3. Competitive markets destroy profits. 4. Sales matters just as much as product.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Everyone learned to treat the future as fundamentally indefinite, and to dismiss as an extremist anyone with plans big enough to be measured in years instead of quarters. Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“But I don’t think that’s true. My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“For example, 1815 to 1914 was a period of both rapid technological development and rapid globalization. Between the First World War and Kissinger’s trip to reopen relations with China in 1971, there was rapid technological development but not much globalization. Since 1971, we have seen rapid globalization along with limited technological development, mostly confined to IT.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The single word for vertical, 0 to 1 progress is technology”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work—going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A startup is the largest endeavour over which you can define mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Sending out a company-wide email that lists everyone’s ownership stake would be like dropping a nuclear bomb on your office.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“De hecho, el patrón más poderoso que he constatado es que la gente de éxito encuentra el valor en lugares insospechados, y lo hacen pensando en la empresa desde principios básicos en lugar de fórmulas.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“What does a company with large cash flows far into the future look like? Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: 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

“The ambiguity between social and financial goals doesn’t help. But the ambiguity in the word “social” is even more of a problem: if something is “socially good,” is it good for society, or merely seen as good by society?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Entering a slow-moving market can be a good strategy, but only if you have a definite and realistic plan to take it over.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that 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. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew. Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Contrarian thinking doesn’t make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you. If you’re interested in making things or programming computers, you’ll be less afraid to pursue those activities single-mindedly and thereby become incredibly good at them. Then when you apply your skills, you’re a little less likely than others to give up your own convictions: this can save you from getting caught up in crowds competing for obvious prizes.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality. And it gets worse as students ascend to higher levels of the tournament. Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. 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

“Framing itself as just another tech company allows Google to escape all sorts of unwanted attention.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future