


If you’re interested in startups and entrepreneurship, than you’ll hear this book recommended over and over again. The single most powerful pattern Thiel has noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.Do you want to build the next billion-dollar tech startup? Then few people are better to learn from than Peter Thiel. It draws on everything Peter Thiel has learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. From the tournament of formal schooling to the corporate obsession with outdoing rivals, competition destroys profits for individuals, companies, and society as a whole. But the more you compete, the more you become similar to everyone else. If you do what has never been done and you can do it better than anybody else, you have a monopoly - and every business is successful exactly insofar as it is a monopoly. Progress comes from monopoly, not competition. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

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