Zero to One Quotes

“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

“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