Zero to One – Peter Thiel with Blake Masters
Zero to One is a very interesting concept. There are two ways of doing business:
- Build a product / service better than the competitors – Peter Thiel calls this going from ‘1’ to ’n’. Such kind of businesses have limited life span, fail to make any long term impact, and fizzle out when a competitor produces a slightly better product / service. Such businesses can only succeed if their businesses are at least 10X better.
- Build a product / service that changes the game – Such companies create monopolies and it becomes very difficult for the competitors to catch up to these companies. These companies go from zero to one. The examples of such companies are Google and Apple.
There are so many meaningful lessons in this book, that many consider it the bible for start ups. And I don’t have any data to disagree with this statement. A few chapters are just outstanding. Peter Thiel has nailed it.
Key Takeaways
Elaborating just few lessons here:
- Contrary to our beliefs, how monopoly is actually better for our future.
- How playing the pricing game can cause irreparable damage to the industry and is detrimental to all the players in the market.
- You need to create a product / service that solves the problems of as small a group as possible.
- It is easy to be tempted to go after a large market and fall prey to massive numbers. This is nothing but a recipe for disaster.
I will not talk about all the lessons here, and will strongly recommend you to read this book.
Who Should Read
All entrepreneurs, future entrepreneurs and everybody who cares about startups and businesses should read this book.
