Zero to One Quotes

“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

“signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“However, when you add competition to consume scarce resources, it’s hard to see how a global plateau could last indefinitely. Without new technology to relieve competitive pressures, stagnation is likely to erupt into conflict. In case of conflict on a global scale, stagnation collapses into extinction.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In 2008, Box had a good way for companies to store their data safely and accessibly in the cloud. But people didn’t know they needed such a thing—cloud computing hadn’t caught on yet. That summer, Blake was hired as Box’s third salesperson to help change that. Starting with small groups of users who had the most acute file sharing problems, Box’s sales reps built relationships with more and more users in each client company. In 2009, Blake sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and faculty members, and Stanford Hospital runs on Box. If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing. A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A half-billion-dollar subsidy was unthinkable in the mid-2000s. It’s unthinkable today. There was only one moment where that was possible, and Tesla played it perfectly.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Cleantech shows the result: hundreds of undifferentiated products all in the name of one overbroad goal.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Entrepreneurs are always biased to understate the scale of competition, but that is the biggest mistake a startup can make. The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world-changing companies yet to be started.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.”
― 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. But the results of those investments disproportionately propel the entire economy. Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively. 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

“It’s true that every great entrepreneur is first and foremost a designer. Anyone”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“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

“Eroom’s law—that’s Moore’s law backward—observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950. Since”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming found that a mysterious antibacterial fungus had grown on a petri dish he’d forgotten to cover in his laboratory: he discovered penicillin by accident. Scientists have sought to harness the power of chance ever since. Modern drug discovery aims to amplify Fleming’s serendipitous circumstances a millionfold: pharmaceutical companies search through combinations of molecular compounds at random, hoping to find a hit.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Today, we exaggerate the differences between left-liberal egalitarianism and libertarian individualism because almost everyone shares their common indefinite attitude. In”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Definite planning even went beyond the surface of this planet: NASA’s Apollo Program began in 1961 and put 12 men on the moon before it finished in 1972.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today. When”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future