Zero to One Quotes

“the culture was strong enough to transcend the original company.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Indefinite Pessimism Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse. The indefinite pessimist can’t know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. All he can do is wait for it to happen, so he might as well eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime: hence Europe’s famous vacation mania.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone. Economists use two simplified models to explain the difference: perfect competition and monopoly.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“disruption has recently transmogrified into a self-congratulatory buzzword for anything posing as trendy and new.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, 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

“perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Or you can radically improve an existing solution: once you’re 10x better, you escape competition.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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. They spent all day together, but few of them seemed to have much to say to each other outside the office. Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“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

“From the start, I wanted PayPal to be tightly knit instead of transactional.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Like acting, sales works best when hidden.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“You could have 100% of the equity if you fully fund your own venture, but if it fails you’ll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable (more than $35 million as of this writing).”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality. 2. A bad plan is better than no plan. 3. Competitive markets destroy profits. 4. Sales matters just as much as product.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Doing something different is what’s truly good for society—and it’s also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; 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

“No company has a culture, every company is a culture”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, 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 matter how good the product.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future