Zero to One Quotes

“Most cleantech companies crashed because they neglected one or more of the seven questions that every business must answer: 1. The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 6. The Durability Question Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? 7. The Secret Question Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see? We’ve discussed these elements before. Whatever your industry, any great business plan must address every one of them. If you don’t have good answers to these questions, you’ll run into lots of “bad luck” and your business will fail. If you nail all seven, you’ll master fortune and succeed. Even getting five or six correct might work.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, 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 fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“EVERY GREAT COMPANY is unique, but there are a few things that every business must get right at the beginning. I stress this so often that friends have teasingly nicknamed it “Thiel’s law”: a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Daimler uses Tesla’s battery packs; Mercedes-Benz uses a Tesla powertrain; Toyota uses a Tesla motor. General Motors has even created a task force to track Tesla’s next moves. But”
― 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

“If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Selling your company to the media is a necessary part of selling it to everyone else.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: you can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead 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 Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Winning is better than losing, but everybody loses when the war isn’t one worth fighting.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“Everything important to us—the universe, the planet, the country, your company, your life, and this very moment—is singular.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“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

“When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can take one of two forms. 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. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme; we need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“We have to find our way back to a definite future,”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“but how to establish a process by which a sales team of modest size can move the product to a wide audience.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Bob Dylan has said that he who is not busy being born is busy dying.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Today our challenge is to both imagine and create the new technologies that can make the 21st century more peaceful and prosperous than the 20th.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit—got”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“That we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ayn Randian “prime movers” who claim to be independent of everybody around them. In this respect Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake. There is no Galt’s Gulch. There is no secession from society. To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship—or jeering—for the truth. 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

“This leads to a second, less obvious understanding of the founding: it lasts as long as a company is creating new things, and it ends when creation stops. If you get the founding moment right, you can do more than create a valuable company: you can steer its distant future toward the creation of new things instead of the stewardship of inherited success. You might even extend its founding indefinitely.”
― 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. When it launched in 1995, Amazon could claim to be “Earth’s largest bookstore” because, unlike a retail bookstore that might stock 100,000 books, Amazon didn’t need to physically store any inventory—it simply requested the title from its supplier whenever a customer made an order. This quantum improvement was so effective that a very unhappy Barnes & Noble filed a lawsuit three days before Amazon’s IPO, claiming that Amazon was unfairly calling itself a “bookstore” when really it was a “book broker.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, American companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today. What happens when we’ve gained everything to be had from fine-tuning the old lines of business that we’ve inherited? Unlikely as it sounds, the answer threatens to be far worse than the crisis of 2008. Today’s “best practices” lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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