Description
Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on
everything I’ve learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an
investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. But while I have
noticed many patterns, and I relate them here, this book offers no formula for
success. The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily
cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe
in concrete terms how to be innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I
have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do
this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.
This book stems from a course about startups that I taught at Stanford in 2012.
College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never
learn what to do with those skills in the wider world. My primary goal in teaching
the class was to help my students see beyond the tracks laid down by academic
specialties to the broader future that is theirs to create. One of those students, Blake
Masters, took detailed class notes, which circulated far beyond the campus, and in
Zero to One I have worked with him to revise the notes for a wider audience. There’s
no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon
Valley.
-peter thiel-
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