Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel. The best way to describe this book? Thiel addresses in the opening pages the book is a series of college lecture notes. Likewise, this book is a rather short 195 pages.
The ideas fall into a few camps. Firstly, in the startup view, do everything you can get away with focusing on a small market solution.
Secondly, Peter’s larger message is avoiding a monopoly. This seems to be quite a stretch as technology has reached a rather mature market versus looking at monopolies at the turn of the century. Apples to oranges by comparison.
Above all, Thiel’s key insight for startups to succeed: a product’s improvement must rise by a factor of 10 or it will not succeed.
Certainly Peter’s suggestion the next Larry or Sergey won’t make a search engine is valid. Google has that monopoly position he alludes to throughout. And the same is true for the next Bill Gates and Zuckerberg. This position is somewhat weak.
Certainly it is challenging to understand a billionaire providing a book with general insights, but not much more. However, Peter gently reminds us how monopolies can acquire a lead:
“Tesla secured a $465 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy. A half-billion-dollar subsidy was unthinkable in the mid-2000s. It’s unthinkable today. There was only one moment where that was possible, and Tesla played it perfectly.”
Above all, it’s nice to get ahead of the competition with tax dollars paving the way for crucial development efforts. In other words, Germany and China along with Austin Texas have been providing tax free offers to Tesla. Certainly this moves into monopoly. Meanwhile, Musk revealed how close Tesla was from filing bankruptcy from 2017 to 2019.
In conclusion this book is a let down. However since it really does come across as a series of lecture notes I was not really expecting much more than a general direction and not the clear lessons learned by starting Pay Pal.
Moreover, a very interesting story of Pay Pal is within Once You’re Lucky Twice You’re Good by Sarah Lacy. Sarah provides a much better picture of how Pay Pal was able to get off the ground. In addition, reading Measure What Matters by John Doerr begins moving your team to succeed.
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