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

Zero to One opens with Thiel’s general thoughts on business as it pertains to his own success as a co-founder of companies like PayPal and Palantir Technologies. According to Thiel, creativity and innovation are core principles, and copying other business leaders is just doing what they did all over again; it doesn’t create new value for the world. Added value comes from making something new. This is harder than copying, but, without such effort, “American companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today” (4).

The huge, built-up bureaucracies within corporations and governments slow innovation, but technology keeps producing creative solutions to problems. Unlike other animals, humans don’t merely repeat the same old motions but learn and invent new and better ways of doing things. Thiel stresses that, despite the value of practice and repetition, progress comes from inventing: “by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world” (5).

There’s no polished way to teach how to be an entrepreneur, since by definition all startups are new and different. Still, Thiel aims to relay what he has learned through his own successes in this book, as he did as a lecturer; the content is based on a Stanford business class taught by Thiel in 2012.