Zero to One Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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