Thiel defines several “Characteristics of Monopoly”. The less competition you have to face, the more likely you are to focus on development instead of marketing wars. This ties in with the first point of being unique. He stresses the point that startups aiming for success need to build monopolies, in order to be by far ahead of the competition. There are an infinite number of unique ideas, few of them are valuable enough to build a business. It helps to think about the value proposition, the actual value that you can offer to potential customers. This is his “Zero to One”, meaning creating solutions where there were none before.Ī bit later, there is a caveat offered as well: just because your business is unique, doesn’t mean it’s useful. that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch. After all, that’s what innovation is all about. A unique solution, a new way of thinking old problems and the ability to question established patterns should be at the heart of an innovation. I wholeheartedly agree with the core idea and basic premise: it’s probably better to build a company/ product with a value proposition that no one else has, than to copy what is there. The book does have chapters, but no arc or concept, so I’ll be picking out some things that I noticed.

The good, the bad and the ugly, let’s see what we can find. There were some interesting morsels of wisdom and insight to be found, but also a lot of dogmatism and irrelevant information, padded by the truly awful use of visualizations and graphics.

It’s recommended reading for startups, entrepreneurs and innovators, which is why I picked it up.Īlas, I didn’t like it. The book has become an international bestseller, sporting the subtitle “How to Build the Future”. In cooperation with a student of this class, Blake Masters, Thiel took those class notes and published them as the book “Zero to One”. Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, held regular lectures at the Stanford University in 2012. Founded before the dotcom crash of 1999, the company has prevailed in its idea of providing online payment services, now serving almost 200 million users. PayPal is one example of a startup company that made it.

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