Zero to One Quotes

“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

“wallets, and monopolies deserve their bad reputation—but”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, 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.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“indefinite optimism seems inherently unsustainable: how can the future get better if no one plans for it?”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, 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.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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

“a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“our surroundings are strangely old: only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“But today it’s possible to wonder whether the genuine difficulty of biology has become an excuse for biotech startups’ indefinite approach to business in general. Most of the people involved expect some things to work eventually, but few want to commit to a specific company with the level of intensity necessary for success. It starts with the professors who often become part-time consultants instead of full-time employees—even for the biotech startups that begin from their own research. Then everyone else imitates the professors’ indefinite attitude. It’s easy for libertarians to claim that heavy regulation holds biotech back—and it does—but indefinite optimism may pose an even greater challenge for the future of biotech”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Nerds might wish that distribution could be ignored and salesmen banished to another planet. All of us want to believe that we make up our own minds, that sales doesn’t work on us. But it’s not true. Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“In Silicon Valley, nerds are skeptical of advertising, marketing, and sales because they seem superficial and irrational. But advertising matters because it works.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“When an imminent catastrophe requires the evacuation of humanity’s original home, the population escapes on three giant ships. The thinkers, leaders, and achievers take the A Ship; the salespeople and consultants get the B Ship; and the workers and artisans take the C Ship. The B Ship leaves first, and all its passengers rejoice vainly. But the salespeople don’t realize they are caught in a ruse: the A Ship and C Ship people had always thought that the B Ship people were useless, so they conspired to get rid of them. And it was the B Ship that landed on Earth.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The only good answers are specific to your company, so you won’t find them in this book. But there are two general kinds of good answers: answers about your mission and answers about your team.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“To anticipate likely sources of misalignment in any company, it’s useful to distinguish between three concepts: • Ownership: who legally owns a company’s equity? • Possession: who actually runs the company on a day-to-day basis? • Control: who formally governs the company’s affairs? A typical startup allocates ownership among founders, employees, and investors. The managers and employees who operate the company enjoy possession. And a board of directors, usually comprising founders and investors, exercises control.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Facebook, the best investment in our 2005 fund, returned more than all the others combined. Palantir, the second-best investment, is set to return more than the sum of every other investment aside from Facebook. This highly uneven pattern is not unusual: we see it in all our other funds as well. The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“if your company can be summed up by its opposition to already existing firms, it can’t be completely new and it’s probably not going to become a monopoly.”
― 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. Anything less than an order of magnitude better will probably be perceived as a marginal improvement and will be hard to sell, especially in an already crowded market.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future