Zero to One Quotes

“We still need new technology, and we may even need some 1999-style hubris and exuberance to get it. To build the next generation of companies, we must abandon the dogmas created after the crash. That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: you can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead ask yourself: how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The next Bill Gates will not build an operating”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“Network effects make a product more useful as more people use it.”
― 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. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“WHENEVER I INTERVIEW someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“la planificación es arrogante e inflexible.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“Brand, scale, network effects, and technology in some combination define a monopoly; but to get them to work, you need to choose your market carefully and expand deliberately.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“In economics, disbelief in secrets leads to faith in efficient markets. But the existence of financial bubbles shows that markets can have extraordinary inefficiencies. (And the more people believe in efficiency, the bigger the bubbles get.)”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A veces tienes que luchar. Y si es el caso, debes luchar y ganar. No hay término medio; o no asestas ningún golpe o golpeas fuerte y terminas rápido.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“La lección para los emprendedores es clara: si quieres crear y capturar valor perdurable, no crees un negocio indiferenciado de productos básicos.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“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

“Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it's rarely a good idea to tell everybody that you know.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If you think something hard is impossible, you'll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.”
― 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. The rapid progress of information technology in recent decades has made Silicon Valley the capital of “technology” in general. But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Whether we achieve the Singularity on a cosmic scale is perhaps less important than whether we seize the unique opportunities we have to do new things in our own working lives. Everything important to us—the universe, the planet, the country, your company, your life, and this very moment—is singular. Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“But a valuable business must start by finding a niche and dominating a small market.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Doing something different is what’s truly good for society—and it’s also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. The best projects are”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The challenge here isn’t about how to make any particular sale, but how to establish a process by which a sales team of modest size can move the product to a wide audience.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“It might take months to develop the right relationships. You might make a sale only once every year or two. Then you’ll usually have to follow up during installation and service the product long after the deal is done. It’s hard to do, but this kind of “complex sales” is the only way to sell some of the most valuable products.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Like acting, sales works best when hidden.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“also about relationships between employees. The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future