# Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (verified excerpts) - Speaker: Peter Thiel - Venue: Book, Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Crown Business - Date: 16 September 2014 - URL: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/234749/zero-to-one-by-peter-thiel-with-blake-masters/ - Source method: Excerpts only. Checked against a full-text copy located by web search (icrrd.com PDF). Only the passages needed for the analysis are saved here. --- All excerpts below were checked word for word against a full text of the book (Crown Business, 2014). Page numbers are from the US hardcover and are approximate; the chapter is exact. ## Preface ("Zero to One") "EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't 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." "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." ## Chapter 1, The Challenge of the Future "Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius." ## Chapter 3, All Happy Companies Are Different "Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away." "In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business." "Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Business is the opposite. 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." ## Chapter 4, The Ideology of Competition "CREATIVE MONOPOLY means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival. So why do people believe that competition is healthy? The answer is that competition is not just an economic concept or a simple inconvenience that individuals and companies must deal with in the marketplace. More than anything else, competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; and as a result, we trap ourselves within it—even though the more we compete, the less we gain." ## Chapter 5, Last Mover Advantage "Or you can radically improve an existing solution: once you're 10x better, you escape competition." "You've probably heard about 'first mover advantage': if you're the first entrant into a market, you can capture significant market share while competitors scramble to get started. But moving first is a tactic, not a goal. What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn't do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It's much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits." ## Chapter 6, You Are Not a Lottery Ticket "To a definite optimist, the future will be better than the present if he plans and works to make it better. From the 17th century through the 1950s and '60s, definite optimists led the Western world." "To an indefinite optimist, the future will be better, but he doesn't know how exactly, so he won't make any specific plans. He expects to profit from the future but sees no reason to design it concretely." ## Chapter 8, Secrets "So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there's always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that's a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that's hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator." ## Companion: "Competition Is for Losers", Wall Street Journal, 12 Sep 2014 An essay adapted from the book ran in the WSJ under this title (https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536). Paywalled and not in the Wayback Machine; not fetched. The Stanford lecture of the same title (Oct 2014) is already transcribed at docs/sources/talks/thiel-competition-is-for-losers-2014.md.