Zero to One Quotes

“Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Your company needs to sell more than its product. You must also sell your company to employees and investors.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“This would be depressing but for one crucial fact: humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, 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.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.”
― 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

“Every living thing is just a random iteration on some other organism, and the best iterations win.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“...a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Network effects can be powerful, but you’ll never reap them unless your product is valuable to its very first users when the network is necessarily small.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places,”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Nerds are used to transparency. They add value by becoming expert at a technical skill like computer programming. In engineering disciplines, a solution either works or it fails. You can evaluate someone else’s work with relative ease, as surface appearances don’t matter much. Sales is the opposite: an orchestrated campaign to change surface appearances without changing the underlying reality. This strikes engineers as trivial if not fundamentally dishonest. They know their own jobs are hard, so when they look at salespeople laughing on the phone with a customer or going to two-hour lunches, they suspect that no real work is being done. If anything, people overestimate the relative difficulty of science and engineering, because the challenges of those fields are obvious. What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy. SALES”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today. When Americans see the Chinese economy grow ferociously fast (10% per year since 2000), we imagine a confident country mastering its future. But that’s because Americans are still optimists, and we project our optimism onto China. From China’s viewpoint, economic growth cannot come fast enough. Every other country is afraid that China is going to take over the world; China is the only country afraid that it won’t. China can grow so fast only because its starting base is so low. The easiest way for China to grow is to relentlessly copy what has already worked in the West. And that’s exactly what it’s doing: executing definite plans by burning ever more coal to build ever more factories and skyscrapers. But with a huge population pushing resource prices higher, there’s no way Chinese living standards can ever actually catch up to those of the richest countries, and the Chinese know it. This is why the Chinese leadership is obsessed with the way in which things threaten to get worse. Every senior Chinese leader experienced famine as a child, so when the Politburo looks to the future, disaster is not an abstraction. The Chinese public, too, knows that winter is coming. Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“I wish I had asked myself when I was younger. My path was so tracked that in my 8th-grade yearbook, one of my friends predicted— accurately— that four years later I would enter Stanford as a sophomore.

And after a conventionally successful undergraduate career, I enrolled at Stanford Law School, where I competed even harder for the standard badges of success. The highest prize in a law student’s world is unambiguous: out of tens of thousands of graduates each year, only a few dozen get a Supreme Court clerkship.

After clerking on a federal appeals court for a year, I was invited to interview for clerkships with Justices Kennedy and Scalia. My meetings with the Justices went well. I was so close to winning this last competition. If only I got the clerkship, I thought, I would be set for life. But I didn’t.

At the time, I was devastated. In 2004, after I had built and sold PayPal, I ran into an old friend from law school who had helped me prepare my failed clerkship applications.

We hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. His first question wasn’t “How are you doing?” or “Can you believe it’s been so long?” Instead, he grinned and asked: “So, Peter, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that clerkship?” With the benefit of hindsight, we both knew that winning that ultimate competition would have changed my life for the worse.

Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new. It’s hard to say how much would be different, but the opportunity costs were enormous. All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.

the best paths are new and untried.

will this business still be around a decade from now?

business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.

The few who knew what might be learned, Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show, And reveal their feelings to the crowd below, Mankind has always crucified and burned.

Above all, don’t overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company.

That we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ayn Randian “prime movers” who claim to be independent of everybody around them.

In this respect, Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake. There is no Galt’s Gulch.

There is no secession from society. To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship—or jeering—for the truth.

The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“MONOPOLY. Tesla started with a tiny submarket that it could dominate: the market for high-end electric sports cars. Since the first Roadster rolled off the production line in 2008, Tesla’s sold only about 3,000 of them, but at $109,000 apiece that’s not trivial. Starting small allowed Tesla to undertake the necessary R&D to build the slightly less expensive Model S, and now Tesla owns the luxury electric sedan market, too. They sold more than 20,000 sedans in 2013 and now Tesla is in prime position to expand to broader markets in the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad).”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is “big data.” Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“only by believing in and looking for secrets could you see beyond the convention to an opportunity hidden in plain sight.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“a great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. By definition, a secret hasn’t been vetted by the mainstream. If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future