Zero to One Quotes

“Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“But if you truly want to make something new, the act of creation is far more important than the old industries that might not like what you create.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“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.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, 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 (if this describes your company, you should quit now).”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Today’s “best practices” lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried. In”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. This”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, 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. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business. LIES”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Just as war cost the Montagues and Capulets their children, it cost Microsoft and Google their dominance: Apple came along and overtook them all. In January 2013, Apple’s market capitalization was $500 billion, while Google and Microsoft combined were worth $467 billion. Just three years before, Microsoft and Google were each more valuable than Apple. War is costly business.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“STARTUP THINKING New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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

“not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done. That’s the only thing that can make its importance unique.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war: allegedly necessary, supposedly valiant, but ultimately destructive.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Just as war cost the Montagues and Capulets their children, it cost Microsoft and Google their dominance: Apple came along and overtook them all. In January 2013, Apple’s market capitalization was $500 billion, while Google and Microsoft combined were worth $467 billion. Just”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“if something is “socially good,” is it good for society, or merely seen as good by society?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“the best way to create productivity is “to get rid of people.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Politicians have always been officially accountable to the public at election time, but today they are attuned to what the public thinks at every moment. Modern”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The power law means that differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies. You could have 100% of the equity if you fully fund your own venture, but if it fails you’ll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable (more than $35 million as of this writing).”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The best sales is hidden. 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 Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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

“If you overachieve and end up learning something that’s not on the test, you won’t receive credit for it. But in exchange for doing exactly what’s asked of you (and for doing it just a bit better than your peers), you’ll get an A. This”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world-changing companies yet to be started. This”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Today’s “best practices” lead to dead ends; the”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“But the most important lesson to learn from Jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics. The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively. Forget”
― 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. (To properly value a business,”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Life is a long journey; the road marked out by the steps of previous travelers has no end in sight. But later on in the tale, another verse appears: Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun. The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future