Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

Peter Thiel · Blake Masters

Sep 2014 · Sold by Crown Currency

About this ebook

#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.

Ratings and reviews

I wonder... Does secrets means facts? Yet many facts we know are based on proven hyphothesis, only when startup prove that the hyphotesis is true that it's become a fact, so how can a startup start with a fact if that fact is yet proven?

I deeply relate to this book on a very personal level. No amount of business textbooks can compete with the real-life knowledge shared in this one. Insightful and important read for an entrepreneurial mind with a true passion. Had I read it in 2014, it would have saved me a lot of precious time and efforts following a blind faith back then.

What really pisses me off is how short this book is. Brilliant book written by an even more brilliant mind. I'll be honest the documentary "Nobody Speak" tried to defame him but it only made me admire him more. It was clearly a lefty motivated agenda in an effort to bring down a self-made man because "it's not fair to the rest of us that he's a billionaire" type libtard argument. Regardless, this book had me GLUED to the pages. I took three days to read it only because I started it at the beginning of finals week. So much insight and business philosophy from a man that clearly knows what he is talking about. He takes a lot of flack from the media but I think that's how you know someone is playing the game right. If your looking for a book to get you motivated about entrepreneurship or even if you just enjoy a magnificent, thought-provoking read, this is the book for you. I wish Thiel had an active twitter so I could tell him I plan to buy every single one of my family members this book for Christmas. I truly hope he writes many more books in the future.

About the author

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long- term thinking about the future.

Blake Masters was a student at Stanford Law School in 2012 when his detailed notes on Peter’s class “Computer Science 183: Startup” became an internet sensation. He is President of The Thiel Foundation and Chief Operating Officer of Thiel Capital.