Zero to One Quotes

“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

“a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“every company starts only once.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Disruptive companies often pick fights they can’t win.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, Napster’s then-teenage founders, credibly threatened to disrupt the powerful music recording industry in 1999. The next year, they made the cover of Time magazine. A year and a half after that, they ended up in bankruptcy court.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“it enjoys strong network effects from its content ecosystem: thousands of developers write software for Apple devices because that’s where hundreds of millions of users are, and those users stay on the platform because it’s where the apps are.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Apple has a complex suite of proprietary technologies, both in hardware (like superior touchscreen materials) and software (like touchscreen interfaces purpose-designed for specific materials).”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“the Apple Stores’ sleek minimalist design and close control over the consumer experience, the omnipresent advertising campaigns, the price positioning as a maker of premium goods, and the lingering nimbus of Steve Jobs’s personal charisma all contribute to a perception that Apple offers products so good as to constitute a category of their own.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future