‼️ Zero to ONE: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel ‼️

 38/∞

“EVERY 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.”

Peter Thiel

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/+⭐️⭐️

👉 Buy this book! 👈 through my link and help me build this website! 😊

📚 Length: 195 pages

🔊Audiobook: 4 hours and 50 minutes

Why you should read this book?

💡Provides handy insights in building PayPal and on what to focus while building a start-up.

💡Powerful lesson for those who invest in start-ups and other companies.

💡Success. What we shall attributed it to?

This book was great and I was seriously impressed by its content. Right at the beginning, let me introduce Peter Thiel for those who are not familiar with him. Peter Thiel is one of the founding members of PayPal Mafia. In the other words, a member of a group which started in PayPal and later on founded some of the most prosperous businesses we all know today. 

Such as LinkedIN (David Hoffman), Yelp (Jeremy Stoppelman), YouTube (Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim), Tesla, Space X (Elon Musk), Sequoia Capital (Roelof Botha) and many others.

Just to mention I was also impressed by origin of Peter Thiel. The best way to describe him would be to say he is German-American. He was born in Frankfurt am Main and lived with his family in other countries incl. South Africa. 

If you combine American creativity and German precision and attention to detail, you are really onto something big.

Besides, I have found another similarity with Peter Thiel I have common with him. He studied law at Stanford University. He wanted to get a prestigious courtship at US Constitutional Court. But he did not get it… In the book he mentioned, that if he would have got the courtship, he would have become a person who drafts contracts for people who actually run businesses on their own, not an entrepreneur who actually creates them. Thanks Peter, this made me feel really good about myself. 👍 

Another aspekt worth of mentioning is that this book was originally created as class notes on series of Peter’s lectures he gave at Stanford University on business and entrepreneurship. Which means, this book is concise and straight to the point. It is no, bullshit, like in Bukowski’s books. That might even be a reason, why I liked this book so much.

I hope I have built enough high quality references and now let’s have a look on what is this book about:

…

“The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.”

An example of a British restaurant in Pao Alto

In this part of the book, Peter talks about competition. Just to put it straight, there are not many British restaurants in Pao Alto. The completion is diverse and fierce. We are taught to be competitive in schools. Only the best are going to get scholarships to study abroad, accepted into better schools and then to well paid jobs. Of course, this is generally accepted lie told by people who never read Kyiosaki. Nevertheless, Peter suggests that when you want to build a successful start-up, you should avoid competition and to find a new market you can easily dominate.

To me, a new business is a Black Swan as scribed by Nassim Taleb.

Some handy principles Peter learnt from the dot com bubble:

1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality. 

2. A bad plan is better than no plan. 

3. Competitive markets destroy profits. 

4. Sales matters just as much as product.

To what shall we attribute the success?

There is an interesting part in the book dedicated to the origin of success. Malcom Gladwell as a representative of boomer generation claims in his book The Outliers that the success is attributed to certain times of constant economic growth (generally the period after the WWII). E.g. If you have stared during the Great Depression, you were very unlikely to become millionaire. Peter Thies has a different perspective and says that the success is earned through the hard work and ingenuity. He even quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances…. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”

Be the last mover and have a substantial innovation

Be the the last mover who brings a substantial innovation (10x better that all the other competitors) into the game. It means that the first companies often do not win the race. They are often copy cat by other companies. Therefore enter the market as “the last mover.” But bear in mind that your innovation needs to be top notch.

 This is the receipt on success I very much agree on.

Start small and concentrate on a small community at first, then expand

PayPal focused first at eBay sellers who were in a great need of quick and convenient internet money transfers. Before PayPal, sellers had to mail checks. It took ages to see if checks were valid and to receive money. PayPal started with a community of 20.000 ppl and then went global.

Finance is the easiest way to make money

“First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.”

It is for the dumb ones. If you want to step up you game, try start-ups. But bear in mind that the investments in the companies you are making have to have the potential to return your entire financial financial investment.

Why people do compete? Marx and Shakespeare

According to Marx, people fight because they are different.

According to Shakespeare: It’s not at all clear why they should be fighting, since they have nothing to fight about. 

Lesson learnt? Do not become obsessed with your competition. You have nothing to compete for. “Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.”

Sales

Are still the most vital part of every business. Your company has to have the 10x product and continue to sell like crazy:

“You’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.”

Man-maschine solutions will prevail in the future

In early 2000s PayPal was loosing a loads of money due to frequent frauds on its network. Whenever the mathematicians found a pattern, the fraudsters adjusted. PayPal decided to apply Man-machine solution, when the software marks suspicious transactions and those transactions are going to be reviewed by real ppl.

In the other words. Computers are good, but they are merely just a tools.

Conclusion:

Great book for all ppl who want to read something inspirational and become entrepreneurs. 💪😉

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/+⭐️⭐️

👉 Buy this book! 👈 through my link and help me build this website! 😊

Feel free to like, share and comment or recommend books/courses you find inspirational yourself. I’m keen to hear about them.

Coming Up Next: 

The Courage to Be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi

Peace 🧘‍♂️✌️🌱