Zero to One Quotes

“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

“All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity. That’s why the word “salesman” can be a slur and the used car dealer is our archetype of shadiness. But we only react negatively to awkward, obvious salesmen—that is, the bad ones.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“What makes a startup employee instantly distinguishable to outsiders is the branded T-shirt or hoodie that makes him look the same as his co-workers. The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“promise what no others can: the opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside great people. You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Here are some bad answers: “Your stock options will be worth more here than elsewhere.” “You’ll get to work with the smartest people in the world.” “You can help solve the world’s most challenging problems.” What’s wrong with valuable stock, smart people, or pressing problems? Nothing—but every company makes these same claims, so they won’t help you stand out. General and undifferentiated pitches don’t say anything about why a recruit should join your company”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The lawyers I worked with ran a valuable business, and they were impressive individuals one by one. But the relationships between them were oddly thin. They spent all day together, but few of them seemed to have much to say to each other outside the office. Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other? Many seem to think it’s a sacrifice necessary for making money. But taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: it’s not even rational. Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your time well—even”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“However, for equity to create commitment rather than conflict, you must allocate it very carefully. Giving everyone equal shares is usually a mistake: every individual has different talents and responsibilities as well as different opportunity costs, so equal amounts will seem arbitrary and unfair from the start. On the other hand, granting different amounts up front is just as sure to seem unfair. Resentment at this stage can kill a company, but there’s no ownership formula to perfectly avoid it.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“At the margin, they’ll be biased to claim value in the near term, not help you create more in the future. That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided,”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“As a general rule, everyone you involve with your company should be involved full-time. Sometimes you’ll have to break this rule; it usually makes sense to hire outside lawyers and accountants, for example. However, anyone who doesn’t own stock options or draw a regular salary from your company is fundamentally misaligned.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“progress without planning is what we call “evolution.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The indefiniteness of finance can be bizarre. Think about what happens when successful entrepreneurs sell their company. What do they do with the money? In a financialized world, it unfolds like this: • The founders don’t know what to do with it, so they give it to a large bank. • The bankers don’t know what to do with it,”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“It’s no surprise that these fields all attract disproportionate numbers of high-achieving Ivy League optionality chasers; what could be a more appropriate reward for two decades of résumé-building than a seemingly elite, process-oriented career that promises to “keep options open”?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: it’s going to be different, and it must be rooted in today’s world.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In 2001, my co-workers at PayPal and I would often get lunch on Castro Street in Mountain View. We had our pick of restaurants, starting with obvious categories like Indian, sushi, and burgers. There were more options once we settled on a type: North Indian or South Indian, cheaper or fancier, and so on. In contrast to the competitive local restaurant market, PayPal was at that time the only email-based payments company in the world. We employed fewer people than the restaurants on Castro Street did, but our business was much more valuable than all of those restaurants combined. Starting a new South Indian restaurant is a really hard way to make money. If you lose sight of competitive reality and focus on trivial differentiating factors—maybe 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

“Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future