Zero to One Quotes

“unhappy Barnes & Noble filed a lawsuit three days before Amazon’s IPO, claiming that Amazon was unfairly calling itself a “bookstore” when really it was a “book broker.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“(To properly value a business, you also have to discount those future cash flows to their present worth, since a given amount of money today is worth more than the same amount in the future.)”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“a great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future. Investors expect Twitter will be able to capture monopoly profits over the next decade, while newspapers’ monopoly days are over.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If that doesn’t seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word “google” is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—as a verb.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the ’90s migration “from bricks to clicks” didn’t work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The era of cornucopian hope was relabeled as an era of crazed greed and declared to be definitely over.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“For PayPal to work, we needed to attract a critical mass of at least a million users. Advertising was too ineffective to justify the cost. Prospective deals with big banks kept falling through. So we decided to pay people to sign up. We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend. This got us hundreds of thousands of new customers and an exponential growth rate.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“By spring of ’98, each company’s stock had more than quadrupled. Skeptics questioned earnings and revenue multiples higher than those for any non-internet company. It was easy to conclude that the market had gone crazy.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The internet had yet to take off, partly because its commercial use was restricted until late 1992 and partly due to the lack of user-friendly web browsers.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The 1990s have a good image. We tend to remember them as a prosperous, optimistic decade that happened to end with the internet boom and bust. But many of those years were not as cheerful as our nostalgia holds. We’ve long since forgotten the global context for the 18 months of dot-com mania at decade’s end.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, 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). At the other extreme, a lone genius”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“10,000 years of fitful advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills and 16th-century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced relentless technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“1815 to 1914 was a period of both rapid technological development and rapid globalization.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“At the macro level, the single word for horizontal progress is globalization—taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In the 1950s, people welcomed big plans and asked whether they would work. Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris. You can still visit the Bay Model in that Sausalito warehouse, but today it’s just a tourist attraction: big plans for the future have become archaic curiosities.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society; they’re powerful engines for making it better.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, 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

“The stark differences between man and machine mean that gains from working with computers are much higher than gains from trade with other people. We don’t trade with computers any more than we trade with livestock or lamps. And that’s the point: computers are tools, not rivals.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Like acting, sales works best when hidden. This explains why almost everyone whose job involves distribution—whether they’re in sales, marketing, or advertising—has a job title that has nothing to do with those things. People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future