Eight Things I Learned from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One By Harshvardhan Mishra

Peter Thiel is a small business starter and (person or business who gives money to help start a business). He co-founded PayPal and Palantir. He also made the first outside investment in Facebook and was an early (person or business who gives money to help start a business) in companies like SpaceX and LinkedIn. And now he's written a book, Zero to One: Notes on Start-ups, or How to Build the Future, with the goal of helping us "see beyond the tracks laid down" to the "wider future that there is to create."

Zero To One is an exercise in thinking -- about questioning and rethinking received wisdom to create the future. And thinking about thinking is what we're all about.

Here are eight lessons I took away from the book.

1. Each Moment Happens Once

Like Heraclitus, who said that you can only step into the same river once, Thiel believes that each moment in business happens only once.

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them.

Of course, it's easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is amazing/surprising (or: single), as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

2. There is no Formula

The (two separate things are both true, but this seems impossible) of teaching small-business starting is that such a formula (for invention of new things) cannot exist; because every invention of new things is new and (like nothing else in the world), no authority can prescribe in real and clear terms how to be more new and interesting. In fact, the single most powerful pattern I (have seen/have heard/have become aware of) is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first ways of thinking/basic truths/rules instead of formulas.

3. The Best Interview Question

Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"

This is a question that sounds easy because it's plain/honest/easy. Actually, it's very hard to answer. It's (related to the mind and thinking) very hard because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it's mentally very hard because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

Most commonly, I hear answers like the following:

"Our (group of schools/way of teaching) is broken and very much needs to be fixed."

"America is (excellent/very unusual)."

"There is no God."

These are bad answers. The first and the second statements might be true, but many people already agree with them. The third statement simply takes one side in a familiar debate. A good answer takes the following form: "Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x."

What does this have to do with the future?

In the most (almost nothing/very little) sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come. But what makes the future (having a unique quality) and important isn't that it hasn't happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today. ... Most answers to the (person who goes against the majority opinion) questions are different ways of seeing the present; good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.

4. A Company's Most Important Strength

Properly defined, a start-up is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company's most important strength is new thinking: even more important than athletic ability, small size affords space to think.

"Madness is rare in individuals-but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."

--Nietzsche

5. The (person who goes against the majority opinion) Question

The question "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" is hard to answer at first. It's better to start with, "what does everybody agree on?"

If you can identify a mentally ill (because of false beliefs) popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the (person who goes against the majority opinion) truth.

Ordinary beliefs only ever come to appear random and wrong in looking back; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble, but the distortions caused by bubbles don't disappear when they pop. The internet bubble of the '90s was the biggest of the last twenty years, and the lessons learned afterward define and distort almost all thinking about technology today. The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.

Here is an example Thiel gives to help light up/educate this idea.

The small business starters who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today:-

a.) Make (in small steps up) advances

"Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is possibly not real or true, and anyone who wants to change the world should be humbler. Small, small steps are the only safe path forward."

b.) Stay lean and flexible

"All companies must be lean, which is code for unplanned. You should not know what your business will do; planning is bold and obnoxious and stubborn/unable to move. Instead you should try things out, repeat/loop, and treat small-business starting as (related to not having a (religious) preference) (trying new things out/testing ideas scientifically)."

c.) Improve on the competition

"Don't try to create a new market (before it should). The only way to know that you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on (able to be known because of previous knowledge) products already offered by successful competitors."

d.) Focus on product, not sales

"If your product needs/demands advertising or salespeople to sell it, it's not good enough: technology is mostly about product development, not distribution. Bubble-time in history advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only (able to last/helping the planet) growth is viral growth."

These lessons have become set of rules in the start-up world; those who would ignore them are assumed to invite the reasonable doom visited upon technology in the great crash of 2000. And yet the opposite ways of thinking/basic truths/rules are probably more correct.

1) It is better to risk boldness than small, unimportant thing.

2) A bad plan is better than no plan.

3) Competitive markets destroy (money made/good things received).

4) Sales matters just as much as product."

To build the future we need to challenge the sets of rules that control our view of the past. That doesn't mean the opposite of what is believed is necessarily true, it means that you need to rethink what is and is not true and decide/figure out how that shapes how we see the world today. As Thiel says, "The most (person who goes against the majority opinion) thing of all is not to argue (against) the crowd but to think for yourself.

6. Progress Comes From (one company that controls too much), not Competition

The problem with a competitive business goes beyond lack of (money made/good things received). Imagine you're running one of those restaurants in Mountain View. You're not that different from dozens of your competitors, so you've got to fight hard to survive. If you offer low-priced food with low margins, you can probably pay workers only minimum wage. And you'll need to squeeze out every (wasting very little while working or producing something): That is why small restaurants put Grandma to work at the register and make the kids wash dishes in the back.

A (one company that controls too much) like Google is different. Since it doesn't have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider (how north or south you are/freedom to make decisions) to care about its workers, its products and its hit/effect on the wider world. Google's saying--"Don't be evil"--is in part a calling/labeling (something you do to win a battle or to get what you want), but it is also (typical and expected) of a kind of business that is successful enough to take (related to the rules and beliefs of doing the right thing) seriously without risking its own existence. In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can't. In perfect competition, a business is so focused on today's margins that it can't possibly plan for a long-term future. Only one thing can allow a business to go beyond the daily animal struggle for survival: (one company that controls too much) (money made/good things received).

So an (one company that controls too much) is good for everyone on the inside, but what about everyone on the outside? Do big (money made/good things received) come at the expense of the rest of (community of people/all good people in the world)? Actually, yes: (money made/good things received) come out of customers' wallets, and (companies with too much power) deserve their bad reputation--but only in a world where nothing changes.

In a static world, a monopolist is just a rent collector. If you corner the market for something, you can jack up the price; others will have no choice but to buy from you. Think of the famous board game: Deeds are shuffled around from player to player, but the board never changes. There is no way to win by inventing a better kind of real-estate development. The relative values of the properties are fixed for all time, so all you can do is try to buy them up.

But the world we live in is energetic/changing: We can invent new and better things. (showing the ability to create interesting new things) monopolists give customers more choices by adding completely new categories of (oversupply/large amount) to the world. (showing the ability to create interesting new things) (companies with too much power) aren't just good for the rest of (community of people/all good people in the world); they're powerful engines for making it better.

7. (state of being in-competition with each other) Causes us to Copy the Past

Marx and Shakespeare provide two models that we can use to understand almost every kind of conflict.

According to Marx, people fight because they are different. The (working-class) fights the middle class because they have completely different ideas and goals (created, for Marx, by their very different material facts or conditions (that surround someone)). The greater the difference, the greater the conflict.

To Shakespeare, very differently, all fighters look more or less alike. It's not at all clear why they should be fighting since they have nothing to fight about. Think about/believe the opening to Romeo and Juliet: "Two families, both alike in self-respect/built-in worth." The two houses are alike, yet they hate each other. They grow even more almost the same as the fight increases. Eventually, they lose sight of why they started fighting in the first place."

In the world of business, at least, Shakespeare proves the superior guide. Inside a firm, people become constantly thinking about their competitors for career (moving ahead or up). Then the firms themselves become constantly thinking about their competitors in the (place where people buy things). In the middle of all the human drama, people lose sight of what matters and focus on their rivals instead.

(state of being in competition with each other) causes us to put way too much focus on old opportunities and (like a slave) copy what has worked in the past.

8. Last can be First

You've probably heard about "first mover advantage": if you're the first (a person who enters or begins something) into a market, you can take by force/take control of significant (out of all the people who buy a product (like a car), how many people buy it from a particular company) while competitors move quickly to get started. That can work, but moving first is a strategy, not a goal. What really matters is creating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn't do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It's much better to be the last mover - that is, to make the last great development in a clearly stated/particular market and enjoy years or even at least 20 years of (one company that controls too much) (money made/good things received).

Chess Grand-master Jose Raul Capablanca put it well: to succeed, "you must study the endgame before everything else."

Zero to One is full of very surprising (understandings of deep things) that will help your thinking and (start a fire/catch on fire) possibility.