Let's go 0 to 1: 21 things I learned from Peter Thiel
It's hard to finger precisely what Peter Thiel is most famous for.
Co-founding PayPal?
Launching Palantir Technologies?
Early-stage investments in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tesla?
Or could it be his contrarian views on education, science, and technology?
Honestly, it is probably all these things.
In Spring 2012, Thiel took his experience, insights, and knowledge and packaged them into a class at Stanford University.
CS183: Startup.
In the classroom was Blake Masters.
Masters took copious notes and then posted an essay version of these class notes on his blog.
Not surprisingly, the blog posted notes became an instant hit in the tech community and to entrepreneurs beyond.
So successful were these notes, Masters and Thiel teamed up to produce Zero to One by distilling lectures and notes into a must-read book.
Here are 21 nuggets I picked up from the book - Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future:
1. Every moment in business only happens once
2. Today's "best practices" lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried
3. Successful people find value in unexpected places
4. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius
5. What a startup has to do - question received ideas and rethink business from scratch
6. The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself
7. If you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business
8. War is a costly business
9. Many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse - growth is easy to measure, but durability isn't
10. Every startup should start with a very small market
11. Don't disrupt: Avoid competition at all costs
12. You are not a lottery ticket: Skill probably plays a much more significant role than people typically think.
13. There are two kinds of secrets: Secrets about nature and secrets about people
14. No company has a culture; every company is a culture
15. Everyone at your company should be different in the same way - a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company's mission
16. Academic ideas about history or economics don't just sell themselves on their intellectual merits
17. Marketing and advertising work for relatively low-priced products that have mass appeal but lack any method of viral distribution
18. A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too
19. Men and machines are good at different things: Computers excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human
20. Most of the world dreams of living as comfortably as Americans do today, and globalization will cause increasingly severe energy challenges unless we build new technology
21. We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today
By the way, if you want to do a deeper dive on Thiel's insights from this class and read Masters' unabridged notes, click here.
-Marc
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