Zero to One Quotes

“ask yourself: 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 Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The most obvious clue was sartorial: cleantech executives were running around wearing suits and ties. This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket rule: pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Properly understood, technology is the one way for us to escape competition in a globalizing world. As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“people then products then traffic then revenue.” The people are supposed to come for the coolness: Yahoo! demonstrated design awareness by overhauling its logo, it asserted youthful relevance by acquiring hot startups like Tumblr, and it has gained media attention for Mayer’s own star power. But the big question is what products Yahoo! will actually create.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“It’s better to think of distribution as something essential to the design of your product. If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Company culture” doesn’t exist apart from the company itself: no company has a culture; every company is a culture. A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. 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

“In a world of gigantic administrative bureaucracies both public and private, searching for a new path might seem like hoping for a miracle.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Better to be called a cult—or even a mafia.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“But entrepreneurs should take cultures of extreme dedication seriously.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The most valuable kind of company maintains an openness to invention that is most characteristic of beginnings.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. 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. 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

“Today, we exaggerate the differences between left-liberal egalitarianism and libertarian individualism because almost everyone shares their common indefinite attitude. In philosophy, politics, and business, too, arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war:”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Let’s test the Shakespearean model in the real world. Imagine a production called Gates and Schmidt, based on Romeo and Juliet. Montague is Microsoft. Capulet is Google. Two great families, run by alpha nerds, sure to clash on account of their sameness.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“THE MOST CONTENTIOUS question in business is whether success comes from luck or skill.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The government used to be able to coordinate complex solutions to problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today, after 40 years of indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides insurance; our solutions to big problems are Medicare, Social Security, and a dizzying array of other transfer payment programs. It’s no surprise that entitlement spending has eclipsed discretionary spending every year since 1975. To increase discretionary spending we’d need definite plans to solve specific problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending, we can make things better just by sending out more checks.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“EVERYBODY SELLS Nerds might wish that distribution could be ignored and salesmen banished to another planet. All of us want to believe that we make up our own minds, that sales doesn’t work on us. But it’s not true. Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“what valuable company is nobody building?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The food pyramid that told us to eat low fat and enormous amounts of grains was probably more a product of lobbying by Big Food than real science; its chief impact has been to aggravate our obesity epidemic.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“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