Zero to One Quotes

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

“The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: 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

“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

“Conventional beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble. But the distortions caused by bubbles don’t disappear when they pop.”
― 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

“If you think of yourself as an insurgent battling dark forces, it’s easy to become unduly fixated on the obstacles in your path. But if you truly want to make something new, the act of creation is far more important than the old industries that might not like what you create. Indeed, if your company can be summed up by its opposition to already existing firms, it can’t be completely new and it’s probably not going to become a monopoly.”
― 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

“Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.”
― 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

“The founding moment of a company, however, really does happen just once: only at the very start do you have the opportunity to set the rules that will align people toward the creation of value in the future.”
― 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

“VCs must find the handful of companies that will successfully go from 0 to 1 and then back them with every resource.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Lo contrario es incierto. Independientemente de lo potente que sea tu producto —aun cuando encaje fácilmente con hábitos ya establecidos y a todo el mundo que lo pruebe le guste de inmediato—, debes seguir apoyándolo con un sólido plan de distribución.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“has inventado algo nuevo, pero no has inventado un modo efectivo de venderlo, tienes un mal negocio, independientemente de lo bueno que sea el producto en sí.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“Max Levchin, cofundador de PayPal, dice que las startups deberían intentar que su equipo inicial fuera a nivel personal lo más parecido posible.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“El mejor lugar para buscar secretos es aquel donde nadie esté buscándolos. La mayoría de la gente piensa sólo en términos de lo que le ha sido enseñado;”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“Es imposible encontrar secretos si no los buscas.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“El modo más claro para conseguir una mejora diez veces mayor es inventar algo completamente nuevo.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“el sistema de estrellas Michelin generan una cultura de intensa competitividad que puede volver locos a los cocineros.”
― Peter Thiel, De cero a uno: Cómo inventar el futuro

“We didn’t assemble a mafia by sorting through résumés and simply hiring the most talented people. I had seen the mixed results of that approach firsthand when I worked at a New York law firm. The lawyers I worked with ran a valuable business, and they were impressive individuals one by one. But the relationships between them were oddly thin.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“every single company in a good venture portfolio must have the potential to succeed at vast scale.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Creating value is not enough—you also need to capture some of the value you create. This means that even very big businesses can be bad businesses. For example, U.S. airline companies serve millions of passengers and create hundreds of billions of dollars of value each year. But in 2012, when the average airfare each way was $ 178, the airlines made only 37 cents per passenger trip. Compare them to Google, which creates less value but captures far more. Google brought in $ 50 billion in 2012 (versus $ 160 billion for the airlines), but it kept 21% of those revenues as profits—more than 100 times the airline industry’s profit margin that year. Google makes so much money that it’s now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“it does something others cannot.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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

“You should never assume that people will admire your company without a public relations strategy”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. This”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“No sector will ever be so important that merely participating in it will be enough to build a great company.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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

“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius. Most”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future