Zero to One Quotes

“That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“once you’re 10x better, you escape competition.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Eroom’s law—that’s Moore’s law backward—observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Success is never accidental.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Thiel’s law”: a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“no company has a culture; every company is a culture.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Watson, Deep Blue, and ever-better machine learning algorithms are cool. But the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?”
― Peter Thiel, 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 everything that you know. So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win. There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, 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. (Government regulations effectively mandate that public companies have larger boards—the average is nine members.) By far the worst you can do is to make your board extra large. When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization. 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.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students—Mark Zuckerberg’s first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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