Zero to One Quotes

“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

“A great technology company should have proprietary technology an order of magnitude better than its nearest substitute.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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

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

“Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“he who is not busy being born is busy dying.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“you cannot run dozens of companies at the same time and then hope that one of them works out well. Less obvious but just as important, an individual cannot diversify his own life by keeping dozens of equally possible careers in ready reserve.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Every individual is unavoidably an investor, too. When you choose a career, you act on your belief that the kind of work you do will be valuable decades from now.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“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 Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“in exchange for better insurance contracts, we seem to have given up the search for secrets about longevity.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“To an indefinite optimist, the future will be better, but he doesn’t know how exactly, so he won’t make any specific plans.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“moving first is a tactic, not a goal. What really matters is generating cash flows in the future,”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Inside a firm, people become obsessed with their competitors for career advancement. Then the firms themselves become obsessed with their competitors in the marketplace. Amid all the human drama, people lose sight of what matters and focus on their rivals instead.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Professors downplay the cutthroat culture of academia, but managers never tire of comparing business to war.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Hamlet: Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death, and danger dare, Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honor’s at the stake. For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: 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 twisted logic is part of human nature, but it’s disastrous in business. If you can recognize competition as a destructive force instead of a sign of value, you’re already more sane than most.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Hamlet: Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death, and danger dare, Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honor’s at the stake.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old:”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future