Zero to One (Peter Thiel, 2014)

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Review: This book went through all important aspects on building a successful business literally from 0 to 1. You can have your expansion plan or big time ambition to reach 100, however if you cannot get from 0 to 1, it means nothing. Rated: 9 / 10
  • Question received ideas and rethink business from scratch
  • Dot-com crash lessons: make incremental advances, stay lean and flexible, improve on the competition, focus on product and not sales
  • Opposite principles: it is better to risk boldness than triviality, a bad plan is better than no plan, competitive markets destroy profits, sales matters just as much as product
  • Creative monopoly means new products that benefits everybody and sustainable profits for the creator
  • Monopoly: proprietary technology, network effects, economy of scale, branding
  • To succeed, you must study the endgame before anything else
  • Success is never accidental
  • Definite optimistic: Hegel, Marx / indefinite optimistic: Nozick, Rawls / pessimistic definite: Plato, Aristotle / pessimistic indefinite: Epicurus, Lucretius
  • You could have 100% of the equity if you fund your own venture, but if you fail you own 100% of nothing
  • Eroom's Law: the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every 9 years since 1950
  • Incrementalism (we were taught to proceed one step at a time) > risk aversion (people scared of secret because it might be wrong) > complacency (already doing something comfortable) > flatness (assumed homogeneous with highly competitive market place)
  • If CEO collects high salary, he risks becoming more like a politician than a founder
  • Opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside with great people is better than perks and benefits
  • Make your culture to be called cult or even mafia
  • People always want to get rid of salesperson but customers will not just come because you build it
  • 7 figure complex sales commonly requires the CEO and not VP of sales
  • Work on your distribution and sell to the media
  • Cleantech could be the next upcoming thing

  • Globalisation - moving 2 axis concurrent. Duplicate 100 typewriters is just copying, building a word processor is progress
  • Dot-com crash lessons - make incremental advances, stay lean and flexible, improve on the competition, focus on product and not sales
  • Sun Tzu the Art of War vs. Carl von Clausewitz
  • Competition - Marx: people fight because they are different (e.g. proletariat and bourgeoisie), Shakespeare: not clear why should people fight
  • Characteristic of monopoly - proprietary technology, network effects, economics of scale, branding
  • It is better to be the last mover. Jose Raul Capablanca: to succeed, you must study the endgame before everything else
  • Biotech startups - uncontrollable organisms, poorly understood and natural, indefinite and random, heavily regulated, expensive, high-salaried and unaligned lab drones. Software startups - perfectly determinate code, well understood and artificial, definite and engineering, basically unregulated, cheap or a little seed money, committed entrepreneurial hackers
  • If the cost of distribution is too high, pay $10 or more sign up fee
  • Question business owners should answer
    • The engineering question - can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?
    • The timing question - is now the right time to start your particular business?
    • The monopoly question - are you starting with a big share of a small market?
    • The people question - do you have the right team?
    • The distribution question - do you have a way so not just create but deliver your product?
    • The durability question - will you market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?
    • The secret question - have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?
  • 4 Possible future of humanity - recurrent collapse, plateau, extinction, takeoff

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