Hey everyone, today we are going to review the book "Zero to One" by Peter Thiel. It is a book that I recently read and I think that it brings some interesting points. The book is written by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters (one of his students at Stanford).
Pages: 224 (first edition)
Subject: Business
Publisher: Crown Business
For those who do not know Peter Thiel is a famous entrepreneur and investor, co-founder of Paypal and early investor of companies such as Facebook, SpaceX or LinkedIn. In total, he has probably invested in over 100 startup companies. Also, Peter Thiel started the Thiel Fellowship, which is a fellowship for people under 23 ( $100,000 in two years total). It gives them guidance and resource to drop out of school and start their initiatives, such as founding a company. Just to give you guys some perspective, famous Ethereum founder and genius Vitalik Buterin received the Thiel Fellowship in 2014.
Zero to One is a book that will give nice directions and advices for entrepreneurs who aspire to build a company. The title of the book "Zero to One" basically means innovating an industry. For instance, it is easier to make something that already works and add small improvements to it (like making a word processor very similar to Microsoft word). Such creation is called 1 to n as it is a horizontal development. 0 to 1 stands for a vertical development, basically making something that has never been done before like going from a typewriter to a word processor. Makes sense?
(Picture of this book was taken from the copy of the book that I purchased on Amazon)
There is no recipe to build a company (that is for sure) since there are too many parameters to take into account when it comes to evaluate the success of a company. Almost all successful companies share similar traits and in the book they basically wrote it in 7 questions: the engineering question, the timing question, the monopoly question, the people question , the distribution question, the durability question and the secret question.
There are also some other interesting concepts that are discussed in the book. Competition vs Monopoly. According to Thiel, no true innovation usually comes from competition, but rather from monopoly because companies that have a monopoly have more time and resource to develop and try innovative ideas whereas companies on a monopoly market, are too busy fighting the other companies that they do not have enough market share (and thus resource) to build new things.
The other thing that is recommended in the book is to both have an innovative idea and target a small market first, in order to succeed. Too many startup companies, make the mistake to aim for a big market and either do not have a enough resource for marketing to promote their product or a good idea that is vertical enough so that it will outcompete the bigger companies within the market. The thing that is first recommended above all is to have a clear innovative idea that will help distinguish your company from other companies. A good CEO should always ask himself what make people come to his company instead of other companies.
In overall, I think it is a very good book which discusses a lot of important concepts. I do not agree with everything that is explained in the book, but the author does a good job explaining why he thinks that way. I think that the book is too short, I really wish it had more pages. I would give it a 4 stars out of 5. Definitely a must read for any entrepreneur. I would gladly read another Peter Thiel's book.
Pictures
Picture 1 was taken from https://goo.gl/wXmWxk
Picture 2 was taken from https://goo.gl/s7aZQ6
Picture 4 was taken from https://goo.gl/jjpUhC
juv79505 sincerely thank you for reading this article. Please feel free to comment below in case you have ideas, questions, suggestions or simply want to criticize this article. Also, note that all pictures used in this article were extracted from the google section “pictures labeled for commercial reuse”. Stay tuned for more articles on health, environment, artificial intelligence, video games, technology in general, books, graphic novels, geography, history, sports and much more!
