Zero to One Quotes

“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

“confidence in our own independence of mind. But advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product right away; it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later. Anyone who can’t acknowledge its likely effect on himself is doubly deceived.”
― 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

“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

“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

“The hazards of imitative competition may partially explain why individuals with an Asperger’s-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, 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

“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

“Whatever your views on thermodynamics, it’s a powerful metaphor: in business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.”
― 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 most “successful” companies seemed to embrace a sort of anti-business model where they lost money as they grew.”
― 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

“Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one.”
― 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

“Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future