Zero to One Quotes

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

“pessimism works because it’s self-fulfilling: if you’re a slacker with low expectations, they’ll probably be met.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“One 40-something grad student that I knew was running six different companies in 1999. (Usually, it’s considered weird to be a 40-year-old graduate student. Usually, it’s considered insane to start a half-dozen companies at once. But in the late ’90s, people could believe that was a winning combination.)”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“To build the next generation of companies, we must abandon the dogmas created after the crash.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“4. Sales matters just as much as product.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“3. Competitive markets destroy profits.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“2. A bad plan is better than no plan.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“4. Focus on product, not sales”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“2. Stay lean and flexible”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“Employees should love their work. They should enjoy going to the office so much that formal business hours become obsolete and nobody watches the clock.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“that success results from a “patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t. In perfect competition, a business is so focused on today’s margins that it can’t possibly plan for a long-term future. Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Twitter already has more than 250 million users today. It doesn’t need to add too many customized features in order to acquire more, and there’s no inherent reason why it should ever stop growing.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Google’s motto—“Don’t be evil”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“From the start, I wanted PayPal to be tightly knit instead of transactional. I thought stronger relationships would make us not just happier and better at work but also more successful in our careers even beyond PayPal. So we set out to hire people who would actually enjoy working together. They had to be talented, but even more than that they had to be excited about working specifically with us. That was the start of the PayPal Mafia.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse. The indefinite pessimist can’t know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. All he can do is wait for it to happen, so he might as well eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime: hence Europe’s famous vacation mania.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“you think your naan is superior because of your great-grandmother’s recipe—your business is unlikely to survive.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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

“The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: 1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 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. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth. These lessons have become dogma in the startup world; those who would ignore them are presumed to invite the justified doom visited upon technology in the great crash of 2000. And yet the opposite principles are probably more correct: 1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality. 2. A bad plan is better than no plan. 3. Competitive markets destroy profits. 4. Sales matters just as much as product.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India’s hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do—using only today’s tools—the result would be environmentally catastrophic. Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“As globalization advances, people perceive the world as one homogeneous, highly competitive marketplace: the world is “flat.” Given that assumption, anyone who might have had the ambition to look for a secret will first ask himself: if it were possible to discover something new, wouldn’t someone from the faceless global talent pool of smarter and more creative people have found it already? This voice of doubt can dissuade people from even starting to look for secrets in a world that seems too big a place for any individual to contribute something unique.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future