One of my favorite non-fiction books.
Ever.
This post is a quick, non-exhaustive rundown of the things that really struck me while reading "From Zero to One", by Peter Thiel.
Contrarianism
What it means to go from Zero to One
(examples of my own)
| one to one | zero to one |
|---|---|
| a faster horse | a car |
| globalization of existing tech | new technology that you alone can create |
| Old Web ads | Google targetted ads |
| Brick and mortar store | Selling 24/7 on Amazon and shipping all over the world. |
| Checking your emails over Telnet when on-the-go | Hotmail (or any Webmail nowadays) |
| An early-2000 cellphone | an iPhone |
| A photographer | A photographer with Photoshop |
This is radical evolution. Not competition.
A good euristic for testing if an idea is zero to one is that it's 10 times better that anything that existed before.
The idea is not that "one to one" developments are purely useless. It's more that in the Grand Scheme of Things, they look more like 0.1 (10%) improvements, than 10x improvements over what existed before.
It's about making something ballsy.
It's thinking with a blue ocean strategy.
What makes a monopoly
Competition is for losers
- Peter Thiel
About vertical integration
Girardian philosophy
Secrets still exist
Secrets are subversive before they quickly become the norm.
Secrets are more commonly discovered by "insider-outsiders".
If you're still not convinced...
Here are a few other summaries of the book that might do it:
