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Title: Zero to One
Subtitle: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Author: Blake Masters, Peter Thiel
Narrator: Blake Masters
Format: Unabridged
Length: 4 hrs and 50 mins
Language: English
Release date: 09-16-14
Publisher: Random House Audio
Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 12125 votes
Genres: Business, Career Skills
Publisher's Summary:
Every moment in business happens only once.
The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin wont make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them.
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.
Progress comes from monopoly, not competition.
If you do what has never been done and you can do it better than anybody else, you have a monopoly - and every business is successful exactly insofar as it is a monopoly. But the more you compete, the more you become similar to everyone else. From the tournament of formal schooling to the corporate obsession with outdoing rivals, competition destroys profits for individuals, companies, and society as a whole.
Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything Peter Thiel has learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. The single most powerful pattern Thiel has noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. Ask not, what would Mark do? Ask: What valuable company is nobody building?
Critic Reviews:
"This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world." (Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook)
Members Reviews:
Seems Insightful Until You Think A Little Deeper
What made the experience of listening to Zero to One the most enjoyable?
I am a fan of Peter Thiel, and have read the notes from the Stanford course upon which this book is based. The course notes are better because they expound better on the broad concepts. In the end, the audiobook is certainly worth the price of purchase, but I fail to give it 5 stars because I know from these notes that Thiel can do better.
To summarize two broad concepts, businesses should pursue monopoly because that is where the lion's share of profit is made. Think about Google's monopoly in search (see my comment below about this), or Microsoft's former monopoly in operating systems. Thiel artfully demonstrates how profits flow in a Power Law to these types of firms. Good enough. I agree wholeheartedly with this concept, and Thiel does a better job of explaining it than a dry Econ 101 textbook, but at its heart, it's not new thinking.
The second broad concept is that a series of Power Laws dictate a range of commercialization activities, from the aforementioned profit flow to fundraising success to income to hollywood hits to you name it. This bears repeating because so many entrepreneurs make the mistake of thinking that markets they are entering are more linear.
Both of the concepts are intertwined, and this is where Thiel could do better (he does do better in the course notes).
First of all, monopolies don't become such until one is made, and until that point, it is utterly non-obvious to the vast majority of others.
