Zero to One Quotes

“Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come. But what makes the future distinctive and important isn’t that it hasn’t happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Todas las compañías felices son distintas: cada una gana un monopolio resolviendo un problema único. Todas las compañías fracasadas son iguales: fracasaron por no poder escapar de la competencia.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

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

“In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Consider the monopoly secret again: competition and capitalism are opposites. If you didn’t already know it, you could discover it the natural, empirical way: do a quantitative study of corporate profits and you’ll see they’re eliminated by competition.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“seven questions that every business must answer: 1. The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 6. The Durability Question Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? 7. The Secret Question Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Everybody should have known that the mania was unsustainable; the most “successful” companies seemed to embrace a sort of anti-business model where they lost money as they grew.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“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