Zero to One Quotes

“In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that “it sells itself.” But anyone who would actually say this about a real product must be lying: either he’s delusional (lying to himself) or he’s selling something (and thereby contradicting himself).”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances…. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” In”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“If you have invented sth new but you have not invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business - no matter how good the product”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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 Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Every company starts in unique circumstances, and every company starts only once.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“No technology company can be built on branding alone.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The two houses are alike, yet they hate each other. They grow even more similar as the feud escalates. Eventually, they lose sight of why they started fighting in the first place.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“So when thinking about what kind of company to build, there are two distinct questions to ask: What secrets is nature not telling you? What secrets are people not telling you?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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

“If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“It’s a cliché that tech workers don’t care about what they wear, but if you look closely at those T-shirts, you’ll see the logos of the wearers’ companies—and tech workers care about those very much. What makes a startup employee instantly distinguishable to outsiders is the branded T-shirt or hoodie that makes him look the same as his co-workers. The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission. Max Levchin, my co-founder”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket rule: pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings. Maybe we still would have avoided these bad investments if we had taken the time to evaluate each company’s technology in detail. But the team insight—never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit—got us to the truth a lot faster. The best sales is hidden. There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.”
― 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”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Like acting, sales works best when hidden. This explains why almost everyone whose job involves distribution—whether they’re in sales, marketing, or advertising—has a job title that has nothing to do with those things. People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business. Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: 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

“As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“Take the hidden paths.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Google’s search algorithms, for example, return results better than anyone else’s. Proprietary technologies for extremely short page load times and highly accurate query autocompletion add to the core search product’s robustness and defensibility. It”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“same problem as every Hollywood studio: how can you reliably produce a constant stream of popular entertainment for a fickle audience? (Nobody knows.)”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century physicists: they see individuals and businesses as interchangeable atoms, not as unique creators.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future