Zero To One

Zero To One is an inside look at Peter Thiel’s philosophy and strategy for making your startup a success by looking at the lessons he learned from founding and selling PayPal, investing in Facebook and becoming a billionaire in the process.

Can you imagine what the year 2200 will look like? It’s hard, isn’t it? That’s because you know the world is making tremendous progress every year, but it’s almost impossible to know what that will look like.

But not all progress is created equal. Most of the progress we see on a day-to-day basis is horizontal. This kind of progress spreads existing ideas and technologies from one to many or 1 to n. An example would be Apple making the computer personal – with the Apple II it finally became affordable for the masses to own one.

Vertical progress is what it takes to go from zero to one and create the technology or idea in the first place. Apple did this too when they came up with the iPhone in 2007 and changed the way we see and use phones altogether.

If you want to create a startup that’ll not only improve but drastically change the world, you have to go from zero to one, not one to many. You can only do that by critically questioning a lot of the assumptions you hold about the present.

Can people live on the moon? Is a world without cars possible? Will we be able to fully live off renewable energies?

These are the kinds of questions you should concern yourself with if you want to play (and win) big.

How often have you complained about something not working the way you want it on a Windows computer? Don’t tell me, I’ve been a Microsoft user, I know. With 75% of the market running on Windows, they’re pretty much a monopoly – but is that really a bad thing?

No! Peter Thiel says that a monopoly simply means one company is doing something so much better than everyone else, that simply no one else can survive. This is actually good for everyone.

Think about Google. You love to use Google, because you know it’s the best search engine out there. Google loves setting its own prices and reaping 25% of their revenue as profit, so it can make its service even better.

And society should love it, because if ever someone came along and did beat Google, it would mean their search engine would probably have to be pretty spankin’ fantastic! Monopolies are nothing to scoff at – they’re actually what any business or startup should shoot for.