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

Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Crown Business

2014

224 páginas

7h 28m

ISBN-10: 0804139296

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is a 2014 book (release date September 16, 2014) by venture capitalist, PayPal co-founder, and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel along with Blake Masters (author). It is a condensed and updated version of a highly popular set of online notes taken by Masters for the CS183 class on startups taught by Thiel at Stanford University in Spring 2012.

Resenhas (5)

4 (Muito bom)

Concrete visions beyond short formalities is the key.

Don’t we all want to look at the future and feel a little happy about it? What happened to the esteemed year 2000? Are we today overrating the power of chance and underrating the importance of planning? Think about it… few decades ago, the biggest structures were built, and fast. The Empire State took 2 years to be built, the Golden gate 4 years, Project Manhattan took 4 years and the Apollo program put 12 men on the moon with a 4KB RAM computer… somehow, we never looked back, and that might be concerning.
Mr. Thiel co-founded Paypal, one of the biggest online payment platforms and also one of the few which rode out from dot-com mania managing to thrive at his business. Throughout his journey, he gives great insights into the world he lived in, from the tech early stages to one of the biggest revolutions… reasoning by shumanity’s biggest problems, a genuine idea which took us from 0 to 1.
He then proceeds by asserting what do we have to keep in mind to create something new. For starters, to think for yourself requires the greatest effort which is knowledge. Then, there are few existing paths to think about: The increase value of something where there was nothing before is infinite and radically improving an existing solution, like Paypal did, competition is to be avoided.
Entrepreneurship also comes accompanied by the Shakesperean drama: “Honor’s at stake, exposing what’s mortal and unsure”. Amid all the human drama, people tend to lose sight of what matters and focus on their rivals instead. Roaming the business atmosphere, it may appear like Dante’s circles of hell: Financial bubbles, giant monopolies, undifferentiated commodity business, internal conflicts, indefinite pessimists, disruptors, venture capitalists, salesman, advertising lions... It’s hard to blame people for dancing when the music is playing.
The alarming casualness is obvious and simple for bullshitters: At some price point which has a durability horizon, buyers want to talk to the CEO, not the VP of Sales. Pursuing single-mindedly activities can be a very lonely path, still, our tendency is to explain success as the product of chance… Mr. Roald Amudsen, the first explorer to reach the South Pole has the final word in this review: “Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck, people call it.”

Link to my highlights: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j5dUQYfC1Wxx6WbPdhuvuuDe8P6a_8T7/view?usp=share_link