★★★★★
Review
“Today’s ‘best practices’ lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried. The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.”
Peter Thiel’s Zero to One is certainly one of the best books on entrepreneurship ever. Thiel discusses topics such as how capitalism and competition are opposites, and that monopolies should be preferred over competition. “Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.”
Thiel discusses that when thinking about what kind of company to build, there are two distinct questions to ask: What secrets is nature not telling you? What secrets are people not telling you? Because when you peel back the onion, you’ll see that the secrets were laying in plain sight.
I appreciated Thiel’s emphasis on selling and delivering products being at least as important as the product itself - “What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy. Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.”
Thiel advocates for every successful company to be able to answer the 7 Thiel Qs of: i) Engineering, Timing, Monopoly, People, Distribution, Durability, Secret (unique opportunity).
“The essential first step is to think for yourself.” It’s refreshing to see Thiel begin and end this book with contrarianism.