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

A Course, Then a Book

In the spring of 2012 Peter Thiel taught CS183, a class on startups, at Stanford. A student named Blake Masters took unusually thorough notes and posted them online, where they were read by a great many people who were not enrolled at Stanford. Zero to One is what those notes became after Thiel and Masters rebuilt them into a book. It has the compression of a lecture course: short chapters, one argument each, very little padding.

The Distinction in the Title

Going from one to n is copying something that works: another restaurant, another logistics firm, globalization moving a known process to a new place. Going from zero to one is making something that did not previously exist. Thiel argues that only the second kind creates durable value, that it is far rarer than the business literature suggests, and that a civilization which does only the first kind eventually stops advancing while telling itself it is busy.

The Contrarian Core

The book's most cited argument is its inversion of received wisdom about competition. Competition, Thiel writes, is not a sign of a healthy market but an admission that a business has nothing distinctive; perfect competition drives profit to zero, and the firms worth building are the ones that escape it entirely. Monopoly, in his usage, is the reward for solving a problem nobody else has solved. He works through how such positions are actually reached: own a small market completely, then expand outward from it.

Around that sit the ideas the book is remembered for. The interview question he asks candidates, "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" The taxonomy of definite and indefinite optimism and pessimism, and his argument that the West has drifted into indefinite optimism, expecting a better future while planning nothing specific. The power law in venture returns, where a single investment outperforms the entire remainder of a fund. The seven questions he says every startup must answer. And a defense of founders and of secrets, of the proposition that important things remain undiscovered.

Whether or not you intend to start a company, it is a compact statement of a technological and civilizational argument about stagnation, ambition, and what progress actually requires.

Hardcover. Crown Currency. #1 New York Times bestseller.