Zero to One Quotes

“So you might ask: are there any fields that matter but haven’t been standardized and institutionalized?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“When assigning responsibilities to employees in a startup, you could start by treating it as a simple optimization problem to efficiently match talents with tasks. But even if you could somehow get this perfectly right, any given solution would quickly break down. Partly that’s because startups have to move fast, so individual roles can’t remain static for long. But it’s also because job assignments aren’t just about the relationships between workers and tasks; they’re also about relationships between employees. 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 Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“It was much easier to reach a few thousand people who really needed our product than to try to compete for the attention of millions of scattered individuals.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“As we said, even the best venture investors have a portfolio, but investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.”
― 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?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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 Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Whoever is first to dominate the most important segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole market.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks’ time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like in 10 or 20 years from now.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In a single tweet, Yahoo! summarized Mayer’s plan as a chain reaction of “people then products then traffic then revenue.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“less than 1% of new businesses started each year in the U.S. receive venture funding, and total VC investment accounts for less than 0.2% of GDP. But the results of those investments disproportionately propel the entire economy. Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. They generate annual revenues equivalent to an astounding 21% of GDP. Indeed, the dozen largest tech companies were all venture-backed. Together those 12 companies are worth more than $2 trillion, more than all other tech companies combined.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“You are not a lottery ticket.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“U.S. companies are letting cash pile up on their balance sheets without investing in new projects because they don’t have any concrete plans for the future.”
― 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”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Disruption also attracts attention: disruptors are people who look for trouble and find it.”
― 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.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Advertising can work for startups, too, but only when your customer acquisition costs and customer lifetime value make every other distribution channel uneconomical.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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

“in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Indefinite fears about the far future shouldn’t stop us from making definite plans today.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The convergence of desire is even more obvious at the top: all oligarchs have the same taste in Cristal, from Petersburg to Pyongyang.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work—going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“All happy companies are diferent: 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