Notes on Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters

07 Sep 2017

This book has got some really good points about entrepreneurship, startups, and guidance on how to build a great business. It looks at a number of topics including: recruiting, sales, creating monopolies, role of technology, and ideas of progress. It is a mixture of his thoughts and experiences, and is a useful read to anyone who wants to be in technology or venture capital.

Quick Takeaways:

Technology as any new and better way of doing something.

Vertical progress is the idea of going from 0 to 1 and building something new. Horizontal progress is going from 1 to n, and is more of a copy of something that already exists.

Sales are critical. You can have a great product but if you don’t have sales, you won’t have a business. You should be capturing some of the value that you create.

Recruiting the right people at the start is critical. If you are not aligned and on the same mission, you will fail. It is very hard to fix once you have started.

Contrarian approach can be useful. Think for yourself, question the status quo, does it make sense? Unorthodox ideas can lead to incredible discoveries.

Build a monopoly. Competition decreases profits, because everyone wants a piece. Not escaping competition will lead to failure. Trying to grab a small percentage of the global market is a bad strategy.

Investors tend to make most of their money on one or few of their investments. Therefore, they have got to invest in those businesses that have a vast scale. Most of their time is going to be sucked up by investments that are not so good. Diversifying and hedging as an investing strategy in venture capital is like playing the lottery, you’re preparing yourself to lose. Two rules: only invest in companies that can return entire fund, and there are no other rules.

Owning a small portion of something great is better than owning 100% of something than nothing. Sometimes better to work somewhere great than try to build it.

Humans and technology are complements. It works best when technology is used to empower humans.

If you are building proprietary technology and are trying to get a monopoly you have to be at least 10x better than what exists.