Zero to One Quotes

“invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit—got us to the truth a lot faster.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“less than 1% of new businesses started each year in the U.S. receive venture funding, and total VC investment accounts for less than 0.2% of GDP.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“having invested the principal of a lifetime’s brilliance, Einstein continues to earn interest on it from beyond the grave by receiving credit for things he never said.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“You would notice that monopolists downplay their monopoly status to avoid scrutiny, while competitive firms strategically exaggerate their uniqueness. The differences between firms only seem small on the surface; in fact, they are enormous.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Technology companies follow the opposite trajectory. They often lose money for the first few years: it takes time to build valuable things, and that means delayed revenue. Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“Monopolists, by contrast, disguise their monopoly by framing their market as the union of several large markets:”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior,”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Every one of today’s smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Si tu producto necesita de publicidad o de vendedores para venderlo, no es lo suficientemente bueno: la tecnología se basa fundamentalmente en el desarrollo del producto, no en la distribución. Es evidente que la publicidad de la era de la burbuja fue un desperdicio, de modo que el único crecimiento sostenible es el crecimiento viral.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“The company states plainly on its website that “TV is a great big megaphone,” and when you can only afford to spend dozens of dollars acquiring a new customer, you need the biggest megaphone you can find.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme;”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Our educational system both drives and reflects our obsession with competition. Grades themselves allow precise measurement of each student’s competitiveness; pupils with the highest marks receive status and credentials. We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Luke is a brilliant and eccentric thinker; his co-founder was an MBA type who didn’t want to miss out on the ’90s gold rush.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“if men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Selling your company to the media is a necessary part of selling it to everyone else. Nerds who instinctively mistrust the media often make the mistake of trying to ignore it.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Since consumer tech is a $964 billion market globally, Google owns less than 0.24% of it—a far cry from relevance, let alone monopoly. Framing itself as just another tech company allows Google to escape all sorts of unwanted attention.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Since the first Roadster rolled off the production line in 2008, Tesla’s sold only about 3,000 of them, but at $109,000 apiece that’s not trivial.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Belief in secrets is an effective truth.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Forget “minimum viable products”—ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that 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 Startups, or How to Build the Future