Zero to One Quotes

“It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, 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.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“choose your market carefully and expand deliberately.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“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 problem with a competitive business goes beyond lack of profits. Imagine you’re running one of those restaurants in Mountain View. You’re not that different from dozens of your competitors, so you’ve got to fight hard to survive. If you offer affordable food with low margins, you can probably pay employees only minimum wage. And you’ll need to squeeze out every efficiency: that’s why small restaurants put Grandma to work at the register and make the kids wash dishes in the back. Restaurants aren’t much better even at the very highest rungs, where reviews and ratings like Michelin’s star system enforce”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Perfect competition” is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So-called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand. Every firm in a competitive market is undifferentiated and sells the same homogeneous products. Since no firm has any market power, they must all sell at whatever price the market determines. If there is money to be made, new firms will enter the market, increase supply, drive prices down, and thereby eliminate the profits that attracted them in the first place. If too many firms enter the market, they’ll suffer losses, some will fold, and prices will rise back to sustainable levels. Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Creating value is not enough—you also need to capture some of the value you create.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: 1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“But no matter how many trends can be traced, the future won't happen on its own.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“But suppose we say that Google is primarily an advertising company. That changes things. The U.S. search engine advertising market is $17 billion annually. Online advertising is $37 billion annually. The entire U.S. advertising market is $150 billion. And global advertising is a $495 billion market. So even if Google completely monopolized U.S. search engine advertising, it would own just 3.4% of the global advertising market. From this angle, Google looks like a small player in a competitive world.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Secuenciar mercados correctamente es algo subestimado, y hace falta disciplina para expandirse gradualmente. Las compañías más exitosas hacen de la progresión —primero dominar un nicho específico y luego escalar mercados adyacentes— una parte clave de su narrativa fundacional.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

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

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

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

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

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

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

“bewilderment”
― 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.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“seven questions that every business must answer: 1. 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?”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Indefinite fears about the far future shouldn’t stop us from making definite plans today.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Properly understood, technology is the one way for us to escape competition in a globalizing world. As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Si has inventado algo nuevo, pero no has inventado un modo efectivo de venderlo, tienes un mal negocio, independientemente de lo bueno que sea el producto en sí.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“El artista de grafiti que pintó las paredes de la oficina de Facebook en 2005 obtuvo participaciones que resultaron tener un valor de 200 millones de dólares, mientras que un talentoso ingeniero que se unió a la compañía en 2010 podía tener sólo 2 millones de dólares.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro