Spotlight on this awesome book by Peter Thiel, “Zero To One”.
Chapter 1 – The Challenge of the Future
“What important truth do few people agree with you on?” Answering this deceptively tricky question is the key to any future of progress—and to building a great business.
Chapter 2 – Party Like It’s 1999
The dogmas created after the dot-com crash continue to haunt us today. The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.
Chapter 3 – All Happy Companies Are Different
The most successful businesses share one key feature that enables them to innovate at unprecedented scale.
Chapter 4 – The Ideology of Competition
Competition isn’t just seen as a spur to productivity—for many, it’s a way of life. But what if it’s actually holding us back?
Chapter 5 – Last Mover Advantage
Short-term thinking ruins companies. The most important lesson an entrepreneur can learn is to think big but start small.
Chapter 6 – You Are Not a Lottery Ticket
The same question lurks behind every success: was it luck or skill? But builders aren’t backward-looking; they adopt a more definite attitude and engineer a better future.
Chapter 7 – Follow the Money
Apply it correctly, and one simple insight—almost everything is radically less equal than it appears—can change your life.
Chapter 8 – Secrets
Every one of today’s most famous and familiar ideas was once unknown and unsuspected. Lots more secrets remain undiscovered; learn to find them and see your fortune rise.
Chapter 9 – Foundations
The decisions you make today will govern what your business looks like years now. Every entrepreneur has to get a few things right from the start.
Chapter 10 – The Mechanics of Mafia
After PayPal, the “PayPal Mafia” created SpaceX, Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yammer, Palantir, and Yelp. The incredible story of that team will help you build yours.
Chapter 11 – If You Build It, Will They Come?
The best product does not always win. Great products do not sell themselves. That’s up to you, and the problem is much stranger than it seems.
Chapter 12 – Man and Machine
20 years ago, people feared cheap foreign labor; today, it’s replacement by robots. But the most successful entrepreneurs make products that help humans, not automate them away.
Chapter 13 – Seeing Green
Clean energy is a hugely important sector—and to date it’s been a huge flop, as entrepreneurs neglected to answer the seven questions that every business must get right.
Chapter 14 – The Founder’s Paradox
Founders are contradictory: revered and abhorred, powerful and weak. Just as we need founders in all their peculiarity, founders need to understand a few things to survive.
Conclusion
What will our society look like 20 years from now? 100? It’s up to us. We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we have to work to build it now.
