Zero To One

Preface

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 net-work. If you are copying these guys, you aren t learning from them.

Of course, 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. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, American companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today. What happens when we ve gained everything to be had from fine- tuning the old lines of business that we ve inherited? Unlikely as it sounds, the answer threatens to be far worse than the crisis of 2008. Today s best practices lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.

In a world of gigantic administrative bureaucracies both public and private, searching for a new path might seem like hoping for a miracle. Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thou­sands, of miracles. This would be depressing but for one cru­cial fact: humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.

Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do more with less, ratcheting up our fundamental capabilities to a higher level. Other animals are instinctively driven to build things like dams or honeycombs, but we are the only ones that can invent new things and better ways of making them. Humans don t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world. These are the kind of

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long- term thinking about the future.

Blake Masters was a student at Stanford Law School in 2012 when his detailed notes on Peter’s class “Computer Science 183: Startup” became an internet sensation. He is President of The Thiel Foundation and Chief Operating Officer of Thiel Capital. 

Crisply written, rational and practical, Zero to One should be read not just by aspiring entrepreneurs but by anyone seeking a thoughtful alternative to the current pervasive gloom about the prospects for the world.
The Economist

"An extended polemic against stagnation, convention, and uninspired thinking. What Thiel is after is the revitalization of imagination and invention writ large "
The New Republic

"Might be the best business book I've read...Barely 200 pages long and well lit by clear prose and pithy aphorisms, Thiel has written a perfectly tweetable treatise and a relentlessly thought-provoking handbook." 
 Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.  
-  Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook
 
Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.  
-  Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla

" Zero to One is the first book any working or aspiring entrepreneur must read period."
- Marc Andreessen, co-creator of the world's first web browser, co-founder of Netscape, and venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz

"Zero to One is an important handbook to relentless improvement for big companies and beginning entrepreneurs alike. Read it, accept Peter s challenge, and build a business beyond expectations." 
- Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE

When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan

Thiel has drawn upon his wide-ranging and idiosyncratic readings in philosophy, history, economics, anthropology, and culture to become perhaps America s leading public intellectual today
-  Fortune

"Peter Thiel, in addition to