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

“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 network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”

The book’s opening contains three ideas packaged together. The first is that business decisions are unique, made to solve the particular problems that companies face at particular moments, and that copying them is like copying something that’s already over with. The second is that copying a product, even with improvements, generates merely an incremental change, while creating something new is a fundamental change. The third is that creation is unique—it’s hard to do, unpredictable, and surprising.

“Today’s ‘best practices’ lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.”

As they perfect their sales and development departments, big companies become self-satisfied and, in a sense, lazy. Breakthroughs are hard, and it’s tempting to rest on one’s laurels, but that way lies decay and oblivion in the modern marketplace. Repeating the same old moves leads to marginalization.

“[…] because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.”

The hard part about going from nothing to something is inventing it. It’s hard because there’s no pathway to creativity. If there were, it wouldn’t be creative but merely repetitive. True innovation appears as a sudden insight, something that shows up out of the blue. Ultimately, there’s no way to force or calculate invention, but innovators can nurture the conditions that help them think creatively. A good way to begin is to question one’s assumptions about the principles that, so far, have guided work in one’s field.