Zero to One Quotes

“In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The hazards of imitative competition may partially explain why individuals with an Asperger’s-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today. If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.”
― 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. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.”
― 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. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. 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 Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“we need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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. For the startup world, this means you should not necessarily start your own company, even if you are extraordinarily talented. If anything, too many people are starting their own companies today. People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it’s growing fast. The power law means that differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies. You could have 100% of the equity if you fully fund your own venture, but if it fails you’ll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable (more than $35 million as of this writing).”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Elon describes his staff this way: “If you’re at Tesla, you’re choosing to be at the equivalent of Special Forces. There’s the regular army, and that’s fine, but if you are working at Tesla, you’re choosing to step up your game.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In the world of business, at least, Shakespeare proves the superior guide. Inside a firm, people become obsessed with their competitors for career advancement. Then the firms themselves become obsessed with their competitors in the marketplace. Amid all the human drama, people lose sight of what matters and focus on their rivals instead.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A good startup should have the potential for great scale built into its first design.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“life is not a portfolio: not for a startup founder, and not for any individual. An entrepreneur cannot “diversify” herself: you cannot run dozens of companies at the same time and then hope that one of them works out well. Less obvious but just as important, an individual cannot diversify his own life by keeping dozens of equally possible careers in ready reserve.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Amazon made its first 10x improvement in a particularly visible way: they offered at least 10 times as many books as any other bookstore.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Recruiting should never be outsourced. Everyone at your company should be different in the same way.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But anarchic companies miss what James Madison saw: men aren’t angels.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“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 Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“we don’t live in a normal world; we live under a power law.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“You’ve probably heard about “first mover advantage”: if you’re the first entrant into a market, you can capture significant market share while competitors scramble to get started. But moving first is a tactic, not a goal. What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so 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. The way to do that is to dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision. In this one particular at least, business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a generation.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad).”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The actual truth is that there are many more secrets left to find, but they will yield only to relentless searchers.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future