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Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

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Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Hardcover – September 16, 2014

by Peter Thiel (Author), Blake Masters (Author)

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.”—Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta

“Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.”—Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla

The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.

Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.

Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.

Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.

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Popular Highlights in this book

What are popular highlights?

The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.
Highlighted by 19,060 Kindle readers
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.
Highlighted by 17,050 Kindle readers
As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.
Highlighted by 15,942 Kindle readers
The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
Highlighted by 13,430 Kindle readers
In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
Highlighted by 12,694 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

The Economist says, “Zero to One should be read not just by aspiring entrepreneurs.”

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Crisply written, rational and practical, Zero to One should be read not just by aspiring entrepreneurs but by anyone seeking a thoughtful alternative to the current pervasive gloom about the prospects for the world.”
– The Economist

"An extended polemic against stagnation, convention, and uninspired thinking. What Thiel is after is the revitalization of imagination and invention writ large…"
– The New Republic

"Might be the best business book I've read...Barely 200 pages long and well lit by clear prose and pithy aphorisms, Thiel has written a perfectly tweetable treatise and a relentlessly thought-provoking handbook."
– Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

“This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.”
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook

“Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.”
- Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla

" Zero to One is the first book any working or aspiring entrepreneur must read—period."
- Marc Andreessen, co-creator of the world's first web browser, co-founder of Netscape, and venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz

"Zero to One is an important handbook to relentless improvement for big companies and beginning entrepreneurs alike. Read it, accept Peter’s challenge, and build a business beyond expectations."
- Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE

“When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic.”
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan

“Thiel has drawn upon his wide-ranging and idiosyncratic readings in philosophy, history, economics, anthropology, and culture to become perhaps America’s leading public intellectual today”
- Fortune

"Peter Thiel, in addition to being an accomplished entrepreneur and investor, is also one of the leading public intellectuals of our time. Read this book to get your first glimpse of how and why that is true."
- Tyler Cowen, New York Times best-selling author of Average is Over and Professor of Economics at George Mason University

"The first and last business book anyone needs to read; a one in a world of zeroes."
- Neal Stephenson, New York Times best-selling author of Snow Crash, the Baroque Cycle, and Cryptonomicon

"Forceful and pungent in its treatment of conventional orthodoxies—a solid starting point for readers thinking about building a business."
- Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long- term thinking about the future.

Blake Masters was a student at Stanford Law School in 2012 when his detailed notes on Peter’s class “Computer Science 183: Startup” became an internet sensation. He is President of The Thiel Foundation and Chief Operating Officer of Thiel Capital.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social net-work. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

Of course, 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. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

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.

In a world of gigantic administrative bureaucracies both public and private, searching for a new path might seem like hoping for a miracle. Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands, of miracles. This would be depressing but for one crucial fact: humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.

Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do more with less, ratcheting up our fundamental capabilities to a higher level. Other animals are instinctively driven to build things like dams or honeycombs, but we are the only ones that can invent new things and better ways of making them. Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world. These are the kind of elementary truths we teach to second graders, but they are easy to forget in a world where so much of what we do is repeat what has been done before.

Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything I’ve learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. But while I have noticed many patterns, and I relate them here, this book offers no formula for success. The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative. 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.

This book stems from a course about startups that I taught at Stanford in 2012. College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world. My primary goal in teaching the class was to help my students see beyond the tracks laid down by academic specialties to the broader future that is theirs to create. One of those students, Blake Masters, took detailed class notes, which circulated far beyond the campus, and in Zero to One I have worked with him to revise the notes for a wider audience. There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley.

Chapter 1

The Challenge of the Future

Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"

This question sounds easy because it's straightforward. Actually, it's very hard to answer. It's intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it's psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

Most commonly, I hear answers like the following:

"Our educational system is broken and urgently needs to be fixed."

"America is exceptional."

"There is no God."

Those are bad answers. The first and the second statements might be true, but many people already agree with them. The third statement simply takes one side in a familiar debate. A good answer takes the following form: "Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x." I'll give my own answer later in this chapter.

What does this contrarian question have to do with the future? In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come. But what makes the future distinctive and important isn't that it hasn't happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today. In this sense, if nothing about our society changes for the next 100 years, then the future is over 100 years away. If things change radically in the next decade, then the future is nearly at hand. No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: it's going to be different, and it must be rooted in today's world. Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present; good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.

Zero to One: The Future of Progress

When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work--going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things--going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.

At the macro level, the single word for horizontal progress is globalization--taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere. China is the paradigmatic example of globalization; its 20-year plan is to become like the United States is today. The Chinese have been straightforwardly copying everything that has worked in the developed world: 19th-century railroads, 20th-century air conditioning, and even entire cities. They might skip a few steps along the way--going straight to wireless without installing landlines, for instance--but they're copying all the same.

The single word for vertical, 0 to 1 progress is technology. The rapid progress of information technology in recent decades has made Silicon Valley the capital of "technology" in general. But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.

Because globalization and technology are different modes of progress, it's possible to have both, either, or neither at the same time. For example, 1815 to 1914 was a period of both rapid technological development and rapid globalization. Between the First World War and Kissinger's trip to reopen relations with China in 1971, there was rapid technological development but not much globalization. Since 1971, we have seen rapid globalization along with limited technological development, mostly confined to IT.

This age of globalization has made it easy to imagine that the decades ahead will bring more convergence and more sameness. Even our everyday language suggests we believe in a kind of technological end of history: the division of the world into the so-called developed and developing nations implies that the "developed" world has already achieved the achievable, and that poorer nations just need to catch up.

But I don't think that's true. My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India's hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do--using only today's tools--the result would be environmentally catastrophic. Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

New technology has never been an automatic feature of history. Our ancestors lived in static, zero-sum societies where success meant seizing things from others. They created new sources of wealth only rarely, and in the long run they could never create enough to save the average person from an extremely hard life. Then, after 10,000 years of fitful advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills and 16th-century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced relentless technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970. As a result, we have inherited a richer society than any previous generation would have been able to imagine.

Any generation excepting our parents' and grandparents', that is: in the late 1960s, they expected this progress to continue. They looked forward to a four-day workweek, energy too cheap to meter, and vacations on the moon. But it didn't happen. The smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old: only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury. That doesn't mean our parents were wrong to imagine a better future--they were only wrong to expect it as something automatic. Today our challenge is to both imagine and create the new technologies that can make the 21st century more peaceful and prosperous than the 20th.

Startup Thinking

New technology tends to come from new ventures--startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor's "traitorous eight" in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it's hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it's even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never invent an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.

Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company's most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0804139296
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown Currency; 1st edition (September 16, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780804139298
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0804139298
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.64 x 0.88 x 8.51 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,066 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Economic Policy & Development (Books)
- #5 in Starting a Business (Books)
- #36 in Entrepreneurship (Books)

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Peter Thiel
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Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking about the future.
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Blake Masters
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Blake Masters was a student at Stanford Law School in 2012 when his detailed notes on Peter’s class “Computer Science 183: Startup” became an internet sensation. He is President of The Thiel Foundation and Chief Operating Officer of Thiel Capital.
See more on the author's page

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Pieter D. Rossouw

A Propely Prescribed pair of Specacles that puts the world in focus

Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2016

Verified Purchase

This book is like a pair of Prescription Spectacles that put the Innovation Startup Business world, into Sharp Focus.

When I first saw the price I almost hit exit. However, I thought “If this guy has the balls to ask this price, this book had better be good”. Else I'm going to roast him in my Amazon review. I ain't roasting!!

As usual I attacked reading this book in concept extraction mode for my normal initial scan read. Chapter 6, You are not a Lottery Ticket, hit me with a Baseball bat right between the eyes. and slowed my reading pace down to almost snails'. Despite this slow first read, this Chapter deserved a re-read, at almost letter by letter speed. Almost every word or phrase brings an idea from the past, often vague, to the fore and into sharp focus. When I finished my first highlighting trip, almost every word in this chapter was lit. I had to choose and eliminate some of them.

In Zero to One, Thiel explores the world of New Business Creation. I would have loved using the word entrepreneurship but excessive and inappropriate use by “experts” have stripped this word of it's true meaning. We even invented a new version in South Africa under the ANC – Tenderpreneur.

True entrepreneurship from basics is the creation of a New business that facilitates Economic Development by providing an Inventive New Product creating a New Market Sector that facilitates New Consumer Productivity enhancing opportunities.

In Thiel's thesis, basic human attitudes can be split into a 2x2 matrix. I also tend to think in 2x2 matrixi. So this chapter fitted my mind. But Wow did he blow my mind with his various Definite vs Indefinite and Optimistic vs Pessimistic discussions. Despite many years in multinational business I could not fault the Author on any of his explanations. He clarified a lot for me. One of them “strategically humble” is certainly a new, yet valid descriptor for a company with a profitable monopoly. Yet in their Financial market press releases, they deliberately select a market description that yields for them a minority market share in a large market and not their true market share in the niche they dominate totally. (Are they hiding from Monopoly acuzations?)

A few key quotes.
”In the 1950's, Americans thought big plans for the future were too important to be left to experts”. (San Francisco Dam)

Ralph Waldo Emmerson is quoted as saying “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances …...... Strong men believe in cause and effect.”

“you should do what you could, not focus on what you couldn't” Is to my mind the Quote of the Year.

Another hand clapper was “No one pretended that misfortune didn't exist, but prior generations believed in making their own luck by working hard”

I consider the following a nice funny; When Peter had to use either the words he or she in his text he seemed to consistently use she. I suppose this enables him to duck accusations of Sexism. Showing signs of being scared of Indefinite Pessimists?

“We have to find our way back to a definite future, and the Western World needs nothing short of a cultural revolution to do it.”
“ A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life,
but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance”

The rest of the book is devoted to discussing the practicalities of founding Innovative Startups successfully. These are focused at exploiting what is commonly considered a secret simply because nobody has really explored it before. Their uniqueness create innovative monopoly opportunities - the key source of profit.

One of the issues discussed is; Power Law; We all know the Pareto principle is valid and 80-20 describes the unequal distribution of results in everything. Peter adds these considerations;

“It defines our surroundings so completely that we usually don't see it”.

He continues with; “but everyone needs to know exactly one thing that even venture capitalists struggle to understand: we don't live in a normal world; we live under power law.”

In this way many other facets of Startup founding are discussed practically.

In the end I came away with the following thought pattern;

A potential successful startup founder is someone who is a Definite Optimist with a long term perspective, prepared to take risks. Who has a mind open enough to identify factual or human secrets that need illumination. Who is prepared to do the hard work necessary to acquire the factual knowledge needed to explore this secret and find a way to change this mystery into a solution. Who is capable of funding this idea or selling it to Venture Funders to acquire funding. Who is prepared to expend the effort to develop the idea into a useful practical end product that solves something significant for a new market sector. AND; Who then has the flexibility to turn around from dreaming, research and creativity. To then display the tenacity to knuckle down to make this idea work in practice, prepared to live through the low personal income initial loss making era, building the practical business.

Thanks – A stimulating read, well worth the time and money – even for retired me!

4 people found this helpful

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Ed Cleaves

Insights into Innovation and Asymmetric Opportunities

Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2024

Verified Purchase

I found the message of this book was thought provoking and somewhat controversial. The idea that monopolies provide more innovation than competition was difficult to accept. The advice was conceptual in nature, so the benefits of reading this book are probably indirect for me. I am unlikely to be an entrepreneur, but I was interested in gaining more insight into investments, with asymmetric growth potential. I revisited some recurring lessons in relation to innovation like the notion of anti-fragility - that some technologies benefit from being attacked. I was also reminded of the idea that network adoption creates more value for existing and new network participants.

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Anshuman Mehta

Peter Thiel does not care what you think. (Full book review edit)

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2015

Verified Purchase

Peter Thiel is an extraordinarily wealthy man. He is a contrarian. It follows that Peter Thiel does not need your patronage, your money or your following. Therefore, Peter Thiel does not care about what you think of him or his ideas. It makes him a very powerful voice that cuts through the noise. I am part-way through reading his book. There are a few arguments he propounds that I disagree with vehemently, but with little recourse to making my dissent known. Not that he would care. But in the most part, Peter puts his views forward succinctly, with clarity and disregard for a clever turn of phrase. He goes against the grain because the grain irritates him. He challenges the status quo. He emphasises the importance of vision and planning for multi-year cycles. A classic quote (“Finance is the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth.”) sums up why an ex-banker like me chose to give up a comfortable “career”. If you care not for the present that is but the future that should be, this is a book for you.

Full review to follow.

Edit - I have now finished the book. If you look past the 2x2 management matrix, so needlessly ripped off from the management consultancies that PT so despises, this is actually an interesting read. Thiel talks of several nuances of a successful startup from the perspective of an experienced hand. His views are original, refreshing, often contrarian but always well argued. You may choose to follow his line of thinking, or diverge from it at the very onset when he lays out his assumptions. In some instances, you may choose to question his impartiality, for instance the chapter where he lionises Elon Musk's efforts at Tesla. You may even accuse him of hubris when he delves into the uniqueness of kings and founders. But everywhere, the clarity of thought and brevity of expression are admirable. And above all, you are left with the unshakeable belief that this is a book not *about* Thiel, but about his strongly held beliefs. Contrarian though they may be, he is willing to put them out into the world and stand steadfast by them. The world could use more of such singularity of purpose, replacing the cult of self-promotion that emanates from the tech scene in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

Perhaps the last word of the book summarises his approach to free thinking (and aptly ties in with the title of this review). 'Onwards', he writes. He has already moved on to the next thought experiment or startup. He does not care what you think.

The original review of five star reviews stands.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

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Rogério V S Campos

One of the best

Reviewed in Brazil on July 28, 2023

Verified Purchase

Different from all the cliche advices, truly gives you a clue on what is needed to build a billionaire business.

WalterJR

Bra reflektioner

Reviewed in Sweden on April 27, 2024

Verified Purchase

Ger läsaren bra reflektioner över hur startups kan hanteras

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BRITES Jeremy

Must have pour les startuppers

Reviewed in France on March 24, 2024

Verified Purchase

Bcp de bons conseils à tous ceux qui veulent éviter de faire des erreurs quand ils démarrent une société

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Bharath Mulakala

Imp

Reviewed in India on March 3, 2024

Verified Purchase

Book contains the valuable information which is important for techiee

Sean P Flatley

Read this book if you want to be an entrepreneur

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 6, 2023

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A great book and a book highly recommended for anyone who wish to atart up their own business.
A great book for any bubbly entrepreneurs as it is enriched with lots of coaching mentoring guidance tips on setting up your own business.
I definitely will be rereading it again.
Best wishes Sean

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Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Hardcover – September 16, 2014

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