Zero to One Quotes

“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

“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

“For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. Those who succumb to measurement mania obsess about weekly active user statistics, monthly revenue targets, and quarterly earnings reports. However, you can hit those numbers and still overlook deeper, harder-to-measure problems that threaten the durability of your business.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. If they don’t go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers. And once they arrive at Goldman, they find that even inside finance, everything is indefinite. It’s still optimistic—you wouldn’t play in the markets if you expected to lose—but the fundamental tenet is that the market is random; you can’t know anything specific or substantive; diversification becomes supremely important.”
― 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

“We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, 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

“1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality. 2. A bad plan is better than no plan. 3. Competitive markets destroy profits. 4. Sales matters just as much as product.”
― 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

“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

“Sequencing markets correctly is underrated, and it takes discipline to expand gradually. The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.”
― 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

“Many of us at PayPal logged 100-hour workweeks. No doubt that was counterproductive,”
― 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

“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: allegedly necessary, supposedly valiant, but ultimately destructive.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, 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