Zero to One Quotes

“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

“confidence in our own independence of mind. But advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product right away; it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later. Anyone who can’t acknowledge its likely effect on himself is doubly deceived.”
― 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

“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 Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Everybody has a product to sell—no”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“While a definitely optimistic future would need engineers to design underwater cities and settlements in space, an indefinitely optimistic future calls for more bankers and lawyers.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The strange history of the Baby Boom produced a generation of indefinite optimists so used to effortless progress that they feel entitled to it.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Every other country is afraid that China is going to take over the world; China is the only country afraid that it won’t.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.” There’s a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we’re being sold.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future