Zero to One Quotes

“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

“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 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

“Anyone who prefers owning a part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company’s value in the future. Equity can’t create perfect incentives, but it’s the best way for a founder to keep everyone in the company broadly aligned.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated. Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO—that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups. In no case should a CEO of an early-stage, venture-backed startup receive more than $150,000 per year in salary. It”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“For example, a world without secrets would enjoy a perfect understanding of justice. Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people recognize early on: in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust. At first, only a small minority of abolitionists knew that slavery was evil; that view has rightly become conventional, but it was still a secret in the early 19th century. 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. 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

“Our schools teach the opposite: institutionalized education traffics in a kind of homogenized, generic knowledge. Everybody who passes through the American school system learns not to think in power law terms. Every high school course period lasts 45 minutes whatever the subject. Every student proceeds at a similar pace. At college, model students obsessively hedge their futures by assembling a suite of exotic and minor skills. Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Talented people don’t need to work for you; they have plenty of options. You should ask yourself a more pointed version of the question: Why would someone join your company as its 20th engineer when she could go work at Google for more money and more prestige?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future