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Flip to backFlip to frontListenPlaying...PausedYou're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition. Learn more See this image 4.6 out of 5 stars15,698 ratingsGoodreads ChoiceAward nominee $0.00 Free with your Audible trial Hardcover from $6.55 69 Used from $6.55 46 New from $10.93 Paperback $15.56 10 Used from $9.79 14 New from $8.84 Audio CD from $27.95 1 Used from $27.95
#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.
Read morePrevious pagePrint length224 pagesLanguageEnglishPublisherCurrencyPublication dateSeptember 16, 2014Dimensions5.85 x 0.91 x 8.45 inchesISBN-109780804139298ISBN-13978-0804139298 See all details Next page
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Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon View Image Gallery Amazon Customer4.0 out of 5 stars inspirational, mindblowing Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2019 Simple to read, easy to understand, really changes you from inside and equips one with much advanced vision on how to start own navigation in business. Images in this review
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Brian K.3.0 out of 5 starsSave your Money-Just go read the notes from the Stanford CS 183 ClassReviewed in the United States on November 14, 2014Verified PurchaseI really wanted to like this book. I've never read or heard anything previously from Thiel, so I had little bias going in. I heard a recent radio interview with Peter Thiel where I thought he handled questions really well and gave some great advice for entrepreneurs. From the amount of 5 star reviews on Amazon and an online list I found of best business books of all time with this book on it, I was expecting something very profound. I guess you could say no amount of Peter Thiel's novel insights and experiential knowledge could have met my high expectations. However, I was going to give the book 4 stars until I hit about half-way through book, where it just all seemed to go downhill thereafter. I suddenly started questioning many of Thiel's assertions from the earlier chapters, and ended up with a lopsided Pros vs. Cons list. I started researching into Thiel's accomplishment's and failures. The result was a three star review. My opinions are outlined below.
I'll start with what I liked:
1.) The book has a core theme of empowering the individual. The technological future is not going to happen unless individuals or teams thereof make it happen. The future is not inevitable. Moore's law for transistors just doesn't happen like a natural phenomena; you need a dedicated team of innovators always solving the technical challenges. (Actually, Moore's law is expected to not hold over the next decade, due to technological barriers.) I liked the idea of "You are not a lottery ticket." Too much credit is given to founder blind luck in the creation of successful companies in popular culture. There were a whole lot of people busting their humps with late nights and weekends making these things happen. Startups are not 9-5 M-F jobs with lots of vacation and perks built in.
2.) Thiel reminds engineers that while their work is essential at a startup, its not sufficient for a successful business venture. You have to get your product to the customer (i.e. figure out the manufacturing/supply chains/logistics). You have to explain how this product is going to benefit the customer. You have to convince a customer to part from his/her money. This doesn't just magically happen, you're going to have to be a hustler if you ever want to see real profits.
3.) Although sometimes obvious, the book is full of useful advice and anecdotal lessons learned from tech startups' failures and successes. If you are planning a startup or interested in joining one you should read this book. You will learn something about entrepreneurship.
Here's what I didn't like:
1.) Absence of Supporting Evidence. The writing style is very informal, which I actually enjoy (makes for a quick read), but many of his arguments are made poorly (sometimes unconvincingly). There are no citations in this book. No references are mentioned. Subjective opinions and personal anecdotes often substitute for any factual evidence. It's pretty clear Thiel has a disdain for statistics of any kind, both in a factual statistic sense and for any technology that relies on stochastic techniques. The book is also chock full of superlatives and (mostly false) dichotomies. A prime example: "Almost all successful entrepreneurs are simultaneously insiders and outsiders....When you plot them out, founders' traits appear to follow an inverse normal distribution." No citation or reference given....yeesh....I mean is this a personality study Peter Thiel personally did or does he just completely make this up? Another example is his central theme: "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." Not really true of either sentence as counter examples are given even by Thiel later in the book (e.g. some companies implode by poor distribution, infighting, unprofitable ideas, etc.) I'm glad Thiel didn't become a trial lawyer, he'd get embarrassed in any court room. Ironically, the book makes Thiel come across as sounding like the ivory tower university professor he so loathes, with all the 'take my word for it', 'I'm the expert'superficial arguments he makes in the book.
2.) Poor definitions and arbitrary/contradictory arguments. It's not real clear what's an incremental advance and what's not. A 10x improvement is not technically feasible or theoretically possible in many fields. For example, a power plant operating at 30% energy efficiency can't have a 10x advance in energy efficiency (more than 100 % efficiency breaks the conservation of energy law). Sometimes just a 2X (100%) advance is a big freaking deal. Doubling the fuel economy on a car (without negatively affecting its performance, safety, or cost) is a really hard problem that, if solved would be a huge breakthrough. It would line customers up at your door. Even Tesla, the company Thiel has a major hard-on for in the Seeing Green chapter, hasn't achieved that: a new Tesla roadster set you back at least $110,000 US, their lower end vehicles are still North of $60,000 US even with generous government subsidies and incentives. Not exactly a common man's car anyone can afford.
Also, the claim of "undifferentiated products" is kind of a straw man argument. Do any two companies really produce identical products? Yes Pepsi and Coca-cola both make similar soft drinks, but they are not identical. Some people like the taste of Coke, others prefer the taste of Pepsi, but they don't taste the same. Big Macs vs. Whoppers. One make/model of vehicles vs. others. One Airline carrier over others. Most people will prefer one over the other, even if just by a little, and even if the prices are different (within a reasonable range). That's why businesses still exist in competitive markets. If this wasn't true, the lowest price, even by a penny, wins by default and monopolies would happen naturally in the long run, without need for any further competition.
His last chapter on stagnation or singularity is very nebulous in which he plots "progress" on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal. It's not really clear why he chose just four scenarios? Why not linear progress? Why not linear with a mix of boom/bust cycles? The possibilities/combinations are endless. What does he mean by progress anyway? Computing power? World GDP? The DJI or NASDAQ Index? Your guess is as good as mine.
3.) Patently Obvious. Some statements that Thiel writes is blatantly obvious: see Elkin Wells "Ok, not amazing." review for great examples. The irony of this book is that it does not really represent a Zero to One contribution to thinking in technology, entrepreneurship, business, futurism, philosophy, etc. What Thiel states in this book has been said by many other people for quite some time. His central tenet of "creative" monopolies (i.e. a monopoly achieved through secured patents, copyrights, trade secrets, etc.) are a good thing that all startups should strive to achieve, wouldn't surprise anyone who has taken a basic economics or business class or has tried to start a business. I mean who starts a business (excluding franchises) and thinks I'm going to get rich producing exactly the same product this other guy did at the same cost. Everyone thinks their business is unique in some way. On the novelty factor, the US Patent & Trademark Office states it's mission is (it's also in the Constitution) "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writing and discoveries." This is pretty obvious stuff, if you have nothing to gain personally by inventing something and sharing it with the world, you probably won't. And we all lose out in that scenario. Thus, a creative monopoly is something to be encouraged. The other key concept here is that these are temporary monopolies on specific products/works (e.g. a utility patent has a expiration of 20 years after filing). Creative monopolies don't last forever. A company has to keep innovating in order to obtain more creative monopolies for different products or refined products. To be fair, I think Thiel was trying to say this about Google and Apple, but he didn't finish the thought.
4.) Started Strong, ended very weakly. The first few chapters were pretty balanced and thought-provoking. The later chapters on green technology, characteristics of founders, and a brief comment on what the future may look like were a collection of half-baked and half-hearted ideas. The Founders Paradox chapter was an embarrassingly bad mix of pop culture nonsense that compares tech founders to rock stars and Gods (I'm not kidding or exaggerating). The book has "How to Build the Future" in its title and all we get from Thiel's final chapter is what he thinks the future may look like in a five page conjecture about what shape the progress over time graph may look like. Thoroughly disappointing.
5.) The organization of the book is pretty haphazard as well. It jumps from discussions of monopolies and competition and recommendations/pitfalls to avoid for a successful startup (which fit the title of the book) to a poorly argued discussion about founder traits and green technology.
6.) Silicon Valley is the center of the Universe? Thiel constantly references Silicon Valley companies and culture ad nauseam. Google this and Apple that. Hoodies, Crocs, and T-shirts are the coolest.....Yes I know it is the IT Mecca and it's where every programmer wants to land a job, but there is a whole startup world outside of the Valley. HBO's Silicon Valley show highlights some of the absurdities within the Valley's tech culture. Silicon Valley tends to suffer from a lot of superiority complexes, group think, and trend chasing as a result of both its real and perceived successes.
7.) Peter Thiel can do no wrong, or he can see the future and you can't. Thiel has made a name for himself by claiming to be a "contrarian thinker" and for his financial successes at PayPal, Google, and Facebook. He also likes to point out indefinitely optimistic the financial world is (page 70) as if he somehow knows how to beat the market. However, his hedge fund took a beating just like all the rest of the others during the 2008 crash. He doesn't discuss any of his failed VC endeavors at all in the book. Would be nice to hear what mistakes you've learned from personally. Or maybe every investment Thiel's made has gone gangbusters? Doubtful. Never mentions the highly publicized failure of his Thiel fellowship where he paid $100K to 20 college students to drop out of college and start a business.
On page 75 he puts up a table of the differences between software and biotech companies (a real apples to oranges comparison, as evidenced by the table's stark contrast of biotech's study of expensive "poorly understood", "uncontrollable organisms" and software's artificially created, well understood, cheap environment.) He then makes the statement, "It's possible to wonder whether the genuine difficulty of biology has become an excuse for biotech startups' indefinite approach to research in general." Actually, Thiel I think the extreme contrast of lack of knowledge and understanding in a natural complex system like biology versus an artificial system like software (which he just highlighted) is the reason for the indefinite approach. Also Thiel seems to have a disdain for biotech (my guess is he has been burned by the slow pace of biological research on several investments in biotech) without a respect for its inherent complexity versus the highly linear and artificial world of computing. Yes, designing the software for PayPal's digital transactions is not trivial, but it pales in comparison to the difficulty of eradicating every ~100nm cancer cell in a human without killing the host. The number of variables (if they are even known in the biotech example) to account for are orders of magnitude larger than any problem a programmer would face. Re-iteration speed in computing is taken for granted as well. What's the worse that happens if your code has errors? It won't even break the machine it runs on unless that's your intent. We all know what the worse case is in biotech/medicine. He also acts like no innovation has come from biotech in the past 3 or 4 decades. What about the human genome mapping? What about artificial hearts and kidneys? Artificial hips and knees? Genetically modified plants that have 10x better yields? DNA matching of criminals from trace amounts of tissue samples that has revolutionized the justice system?
He also didn't see the Green Tech bubble coming? In the seeing green chapter he rails against solar companies for seeking only incremental advances in technology as their major downfall. Yet he fails to see the real technological challenges of solar and wind: they are location specific and their energy density (the amount of energy you get from the same stored volume or weight of the fuel) is nowhere near that of nuclear and non-renewables. That is a huge pitfall to overcome in the energy and transportation sector and it's always been the well-known reason why wind and solar are niche power applications. At a coal or nuclear power plant, if the energy demand from a nearby city goes up, you just burn more fuel and possibly start up another turbine. The amount of fuel you have is only limited by logistics and your onsite storage. Not only are onsite storage needs larger for a solar or wind farm (a battery has much lower energy density than a lump of coal/ fuel rod/gallon of gasoline of the same weight) but your fuel (essentially electrons for storage) is generated onsite. Both wind and solar need enormously large areas of generation equipment (panels or turbines) to generate any appreciable energy for even a small city. And the ideal location for solar and wind power plants are often in deserts or on mountain sides, or miles off the coastline: exactly where most people don't live. So any efficiency gains you get from putting it in an ideal location is lost to power line transmission by having to put it far away from people using the power. The poor energy density is an even bigger problem with electric vehicles. These are multiple engineering feats that need major improvement, not simply a 10x reduction in a single technology. Nevertheless, modest efficiency gains of even a few percent in the energy sector are technically challenging or costly or both; thermal efficiency of conventional power plants have gone up only ~10-15% in the past century. There are fundamental limits to thermodynamics.
In the end, Thiel is susceptible to the same dogmas ("peak oil", Malthusian resource shortages, the inevitability of "green" technology, reduce carbon emissions at all costs) that anyone else could end up believing without questioning any assumptions. Thiel shows a glaring ignorance of technology outside of IT. When technical progress doesn't meet the accelerated pace that he's seen in the computing world, he resorts to shooting the messenger and blaming the researchers within the field.
9.) If all the negatives above sounds like a class you've taken in college. That's because that's exactly how this book started. Thiel taught a class at Standford about startups with the same material. In fairness, Thiel's audience for the lectures that inspired the book, freshman and sophomores in Stanford's Computer Science department, probably know as much about business and economics as Thiel knows about being humble about his success at PayPal, hence the lack of any real depth on any particular subject matter. However, this is not forgivable when the notes from a class are almost pasted into a hardcover book verbatim. I mean there was a chance for some serious editing, more depth and refinement, and re-organization during this conversion process, but it doesn't appear much thought went into any of these. Honestly I thought the notes were better (which has more chapters as well), because they included many more pictures with better humor and more detail. My guess is that Thiel probably gave outstanding lectures with some cool Powerpoint slides, but any charisma and charm from the lectures were lost during the book transition.
Qualifiers and Disclaimers: I'm a bioengineer doing both hardware and software for a small biotech startup. I was a patent examiner (in semiconductors) for the USPTO and still do part-time contract work for them (in mechanical and medical devices) so I see innovation all the time. I also consider myself a libertarian politically, as does Peter Thiel. Read some of the other 3 star reviews of this book, they are very much on point.Read more56 people found this helpful Helpful Report abuseedsetiadi5.0 out of 5 starsA billionaire’s lecture notesReviewed in the United States on June 3, 2022Verified PurchaseIn 2012 venture capitalist Peter Thiel taught a course in his alma matter Stanford about startup, entrepreneurship, and business in general. And among his many students, one in particular, Blake Masters, took very detailed and diligent notes where it then being copied, shared, and became wildly popular among the students.
This book is the polished edition of that concise notes. And it is one of the best business books I’ve ever read.
Thiel’s lessons begin with a simple message: Dominate a small niche and scale up from there. As he explains, “[t]he perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.”
Because, it is easier to dominate a small market than a large market already filled with competing companies. Thiel gave the exaggerated example of the cure for baldness or a drug to safely eliminate the need for sleep, to make the point across. But the message is clear: if we build something valuable that never existed before, the increase in value is theoretically limitless.
However, he also throw some cold water over the common believe that great products sell themselves, as plenty of potentially great inventions were born and died without much fanfare. Thiel commented, “[i]f you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.”
And thus he emphasizes the importance of branding, network effects, utilization of technology, etc, including choosing our market carefully and expanding deliberately within it. Chapter 11 on sales, marketing, and advertising covers this in great detail.
Alternatively, if we cannot come up with something revolutionary, as a start up we can instead radically improve an existing solution. As Thiel remarked, “PayPal, for instance, made buying and selling on eBay at least 10 times better. Instead of mailing a check that would take 7 to 10 days to arrive, PayPal let buyers pay as soon as an auction ended. Sellers received their proceeds right away, and unlike with a check, they knew the funds were good.”
And this book is filled with tactics and examples for these kinds of improvement insights. For example, Thiel mentions about the metrics that he use to set the limits for effective distribution: “The total net profit that you earn on average over the course of your relationship with a customer (Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV) must exceed the amount you spend on average to acquire a new customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). In general, the higher the price of your product, the more you have to spend to make a sale—and the more it makes sense to spend it.”
The book then step forward to the next progress in a start up: the importance of careful scaling and expansion. Thiel says that there are 2 forms of progress, vertical and horizontal. Vertical progress means doing completely new things (like what Richard Branson have done multiple times from records to airlines to beverages etc), while horizontal progress involves copying things that work, which is a more natural progression. As Thiel commented “[t]he most successful ecompanies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.”
The best example for this horizontal progression is Amazon, where they showed how it can be masterfully done, from books to CDs to pretty much everything today. Here’s Thiel again: “Jeff Bezos’s founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books. There were millions of books to catalog, but they all had roughly the same shape, they were easy to ship, and some of the most rarely sold books—those least profitable for any retail store to keep in stock—also drew the most enthusiastic customers.”
Moreover, in the book Thiel also writes about his experience as an investor looking at businesses from the outside perspective, with special mention of the pareto principle, where roughly 20% of successful investments (or start-up attempts) will outperform the 80% of flops and still leave us with a net gain, sometimes even a big one. He provides a compelling argument using many examples to show the principle at work, which is nothing short of an epiphany for me. The message from him is again simple: in the end it’s about the batting average, not the once (or few) in a lifetime home runs. And this also applies in many other walks of life.
I could really go on and on about the wide range of topics in this dense book, which also teaches us about disruptions, luck, definite and indefinite views of the future. It tells us about when to fight with all we got, when to step back, or when to merge (if you can’t beat them, join them). And ultimately, it provides us with the day-to-day framework to efficiently run a business, which was the main reason why my entrepreneur friend highly recommended this book to me in the first place.Read more3 people found this helpful Helpful Report abuseSee all reviews
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Peter - The Reading Desk4.0 out of 5 starsStep Change Innovation for StartupsReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 8, 2018Verified PurchaseIn business, we don’t get the panacea methodology to deliver a market-dominating business or monopoly, and the methodology for the next big thing likely hasn’t been defined yet. We need to look at each business from multiple perspectives and I do believe Peter Thiel provides another unique perspective – not a replacement perspective but an additional one. The research shows that disruptive innovation typically comes from new start companies and they tend to dominate a new market niche until they grow dramatically or are acquired. Iterative innovation in specific markets tends to be dominated by the incumbents, which are usually large multinational companies if the market is lucrative. So I agree with Peter Thiel, that new start businesses need to consider an order of magnitude value step change over existing solutions, to succeed, which is the zero to one transformation.
"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 in the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange."
Zero to One suggests a very different method from the lean-agile approach proposed by Steve Blank and Eric Ries in The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Lean Startup respectively. They suggest that Customer Discovery, Validation, Creation and Building are the cornerstones of the startup approach.
I believe we need to start with a vision of what a successful business would look like, and we need to see that it will be significantly different (10x) from existing competitive solutions. How do we get there? By understanding and executing a market entry path that is iteratively to build, test & learn. I would also question Thiel’s suggestion that only technology enables that step change. In the cited case of Facebook, there were multiple solutions offering social media platforms and it appears the leadership and marketing of Facebook, were more the decisive factors. We could even argue that Facebook is an example of the Eric Ries approach.
The example of Paypal and Thiel’s insights into the economy and the investment community around the DotCom boom and bust were very interesting. The investor expectations are a constant challenge as I’ve heard from one investor that he wouldn’t get out of bed if a company wasn’t turning over €40million in 3 years and another saying if you showed me figures like that I’d think I was working with idiots with their heads in the clouds.
After the main point of vertical innovation is made, the book rambles and while the discussion points are interesting you often wonder what this has that to do with the main premise of the book. The book does feel a little unstructured and elements seem to be included as they were part of a lecture series rather than an integral part of a framework for achieving that 0 to 1 impact.
I would recommend reading this book as it may encourage and inspire you to consider where you want to go with the company and its core solutions. It does, however, need to be tempered with the knowledge that other approaches exist and Peter Thiel may be wrong, at least in parts.Read more38 people found this helpfulReport abuseGnana Shekhar Reddy4.0 out of 5 starsIncluding success stories of Mark and Musk...Reviewed in India on May 15, 2018Verified PurchaseDelivery: On promised day which is 2 days from ordered date. Packaging was good. Book came with air tight seal. Bookmark came with the book.
Book: Feels original, not a digital copy. But paper quality makes it doubtful.
Content: Author express the huge requirement of new ideas and uniqueness. Including success stories of Mark and Musk makes it interesting and inspirational to read.Read more4.0 out of 5 stars Including success stories of Mark and Musk... Reviewed in India on May 15, 2018 Delivery: On promised day which is 2 days from ordered date. Packaging was good. Book came with air tight seal. Bookmark came with the book.
Book: Feels original, not a digital copy. But paper quality makes it doubtful.
Content: Author express the huge requirement of new ideas and uniqueness. Including success stories of Mark and Musk makes it interesting and inspirational to read. Images in this review 86 people found this helpfulReport abuseChola Impressions4.0 out of 5 starsA new perspective on starting a business & measuring monopoly. A decent read for entrepreneursReviewed in India on November 25, 2016Verified PurchaseThe book gives a completely new perspective on how businesses should be run or rather on what basis one should even start a company. Discusses mostly about monopoly - and a definition for it. I have come across this measure of monopoly for the first time. The author emphasizes the importance of salesmen. Says the real selling is when customers are not even aware that the selling is happening. And goes on to sell his product, his current investment to the readers - not sure how many realised this. At the end, there was too much focus on trivial and uninteresting things like how founders are eccentric - may be he wants to show the audience that how cool he is. No credit was given to Sean Parker who introduced Zuckerberg to Thiel - the first major outside investment in Facebook. Instead Parker was portrayed as a villain who didn't know what he was doing. It ends with a philosophy called Singularity where there is infinite hope for the future. And according to the author, technology is the only thing that is capable of achieving it - with so many helping move the current scenario from 0 to 1. Other factors like psychology, spirituality, and other unknown realms are completely discounted by the authorRead more125 people found this helpfulReport abuseSam5.0 out of 5 starsWas teetering on between 4 and 5 starsReviewed in the United Kingdom on December 25, 2018Verified PurchaseIn the beginning the author did sound too sure of himself which put me off...but upon giving the book a second try, I realised that he is actually very well credentialed to write the book mainly due to his real life practical experience founding/being part of world changing companies. Very glad that I stuck with the book, learned some amazing things about economics, and most importantly the author gave me PERSPECTIVE on the industry of business and economics as a whole which I am very thankful for.
Would recommend at the least underlining and recapping between readings. Very versatile book to as it caters to not only those who are starting out trying to think of a business idea, but also to those who have a business and are trying to build teams as well as anyone in business who wants to grow.
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