Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

Decode the DNA of business and uncover value and opportunity where others don't

Dear friends, good afternoon! Welcome everyone to ReadVault Club, I am Tom Niklas, a seasoned writer and book reviewer. Please subscribe to me and join us in reading 52 books a year together.

Today, we're going to talk about a book that was named one of the best business books a few years ago and is probably also one of the best-selling books, "Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future." The author of this book is Peter Thiel, and I would consider this book a masterpiece that takes a philosophical approach to understanding entrepreneurship.

So, if you're an entrepreneur, listening to this book could save you a lot of trouble. We know that the success rate of startups is not very high, and that's because many people start businesses without learning anything about it. Just by listening to this book and learning some basic entrepreneurial concepts, you can avoid a lot of risks. After three to five years, many companies realize that the direction they chose from the beginning was wrong, right? So, it's worth listening to how successful people do it.

Why is Peter Thiel so awesome? His book is widely acclaimed because he founded a company called PayPal. To understand the history of PayPal, you should read the book "The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth." It tells the whole story of PayPal very clearly. It changed the way people pay for things all over the world. They did this in 1999. As long as you had an email address, you could pay with dollars.

After that, he sold PayPal to eBay and started his investment fund. Which companies did he invest in? The first famous one was Facebook, and he probably made tens of thousands of times his money on that. Then he invested in SpaceX, Yelp, YouTube, and Tesla. Peter Thiel was an angel investor in all of these companies. So, you can imagine how much influence this guy has in Silicon Valley.

What does "Zero to One" mean? This term has become popular. Whenever Thiel interviews a job candidate, he asks them one simple question: "What are some things that you believe that are different from what everyone else believes?" He wants to find people who think differently.

Some people might say, "I'm against the American education system" or "I'm against racism." That's not the right answer. Why? Because many people before you have already been against those things. You're just picking a side, right? You're choosing to be in the minority or the majority. That's not a unique idea.

So, what is a unique idea? Thiel says the pattern for the right answer is this: most people believe X, but the truth is the opposite of X. So, Thiel looks for people like this to build his team, people who can look at things from a different perspective.