Zero to One Quotes

“On the inside, every individual should be sharply distinguished by her work.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Just cover the basics like health insurance and then promise what no others can: the opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside great people. You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“. If you want that kind of free rein from your board, blow it up to giant size. If you want an effective board, keep it small.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“A board of three is ideal. Your board should never exceed five people, unless your company is publicly held.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Of course, this customer acquisition strategy was unsustainable on its own—when you pay people to be your customers, exponential growth means an exponentially growing cost structure.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, 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.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology. Because globalization and technology are different modes of progress, it’s possible to have both, either, or neither at the same time.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Indeed, 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

“Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“ZocDoc is a Founders Fund portfolio company that helps people find and book medical appointments online. The company charges doctors a few hundred dollars per month to be included in its network. With an average deal size of just a few thousand dollars, ZocDoc needs lots of salespeople—so many that they have an internal recruiting team to do nothing but hire more. But making personal sales to doctors doesn’t just bring in revenue; by adding doctors to the network, salespeople make the product more valuable to consumers (and more consumer users increases its appeal to doctors). More than 5 million people already use the service each month, and if it can continue to scale its network to include a majority of practitioners, it will become a fundamental utility for the U.S. health care industry.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your time well—even in purely financial terms.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“La ambigüedad entre las metas sociales y económicas no ayuda. Pero la ambigüedad en el mundo «social» es un problema mayor aun: si algo es «socialmente bueno» ¿es bueno para la sociedad o simplemente es visto como algo bueno por la sociedad? Cualquier cosa lo
suficientemente buena para recibir el aplauso de todas las audiencias sólo puede ser convencional, como la idea general de la energía verde.
El progreso no se detiene por la diferencia que pueda existir entre la avaricia corporativa y la bonhomía de las organizaciones sin ánimo de lucro; en cambio, nosotros sí estamos limitados por la similitud de ambos. Igual que las corporaciones tienden a copiarse unas a otras, las organizaciones suelen tener las mismas prioridades. La tecnología limpia pone de manifiesto el resultado: cientos de productos indiferenciados, creados todos en nombre de un objetivo demasiado amplio.
Hacer algo diferente es lo realmente bueno para la sociedad, y es también lo que permite que un negocio consiga beneficios a través de la monopolización de un mercado. Los mejores proyectos suelen pasarse por alto, no son pregonados a los cuatro vientos por la multitud; los mejores problemas sobre los que trabajar suelen ser aquellos que nadie más intenta resolver.”
― 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. But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. 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 could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. 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.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“La ambigüedad entre las metas sociales y económicas no ayuda. Pero la ambigüedad en el mundo «social» es un problema mayor aun: si algo es «socialmente bueno» ¿es bueno para la
sociedad o simplemente es visto como algo bueno por la sociedad? Cualquier cosa lo
suficientemente buena para recibir el aplauso de todas las audiencias sólo puede ser convencional, como la idea general de la energía verde.
El progreso no se detiene por la diferencia que pueda existir entre la avaricia corporativa y la
bonhomía de las organizaciones sin ánimo de lucro; en cambio, nosotros sí estamos limitados por la similitud de ambos. Igual que las corporaciones tienden a copiarse unas a otras, las organizaciones suelen tener las mismas prioridades. La tecnología limpia pone de manifiesto el resultado: cientos de productos indiferenciados, creados todos en nombre de un objetivo demasiado amplio.
Hacer algo diferente es lo realmente bueno para la sociedad, y es también lo que permite que un negocio consiga beneficios a través de la monopolización de un mercado. Los mejores proyectos suelen pasarse por alto, no son pregonados a los cuatro vientos por la multitud; los mejores problemas sobre los que trabajar suelen ser aquellos que nadie más intenta resolver.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“. The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 6. The Durability Question Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? 7. The Secret Question Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done. That’s the only thing that can make its importance unique. At”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO—that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups. In no case should a CEO of an early-stage, venture-backed startup receive more than $150,000 per year in salary”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“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. Small doesn’t mean nonexistent. We”
― 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

“As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“HE BUSINESS VERSION of our contrarian question is: what valuable company is nobody building?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“These lessons have become dogma in the startup world; those who would ignore them are presumed to invite the justified doom visited upon technology in the great crash of 2000. And yet the opposite 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

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