Zero to One Quotes

“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

“anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter. This”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; and as a result, we trap ourselves within it—even though the more we compete, the less we gain.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century physicists: they see individuals and businesses as interchangeable atoms, not as unique creators. Their theories describe an equilibrium state of perfect competition because that’s what’s easy to model, not because it represents the best of business. But”
― Peter Thiel, 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. A”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“On the inside, every individual should be sharply distinguished by her work.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“disruption has recently transmogrified into a self-congratulatory buzzword for anything posing as trendy and new. This”
― 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 (if”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“valuable business must start by finding a niche and dominating a small market.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“An entrepreneur can’t benefit from macro-scale insight unless his own plans begin at the micro-scale.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future