Zero to One Quotes

“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

“Creating value is not enough—you also need to capture some of the value you create. This means that even very big businesses can be bad businesses. For example, U.S. airline companies serve millions of passengers and create hundreds of billions of dollars of value each year. But in 2012, when the average airfare each way was $ 178, the airlines made only 37 cents per passenger trip. Compare them to Google, which creates less value but captures far more. Google brought in $ 50 billion in 2012 (versus $ 160 billion for the airlines), but it kept 21% of those revenues as profits—more than 100 times the airline industry’s profit margin that year. Google makes so much money that it’s now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If you treat the future something definite, it makes to understand it in advance and to work to shape it .”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Competition means no profit for everybody , no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival so why do people believe that competition is healthy ? .......
....The more we compete the less we gain .”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“(Other investors were in even more of a hurry. A South Korean firm wired us $5 million without first negotiating a deal or signing any documents. When I tried to return the money, they wouldn’t tell me where to send it.)”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“the knowledge underlying civilization is so widespread today”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“cleantech was even more of a social phenomenon than an environmental imperative.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd;”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“reducing human capabilities into specialized tasks that computers can be trained to conquer one by one.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“That seems impressive—until you remember that an average four-year-old can do it flawlessly.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“There’s a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we’re being sold.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future