Peter Thiel on Building the Future

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Silicon Valley hangs on to the words of Peter Thiel.  The billionaire entrepreneur and early financier of Facebook has now put those words to paper with the release his book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.

Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice.

His, Founders Fund, famously displays the tagline, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”  He only recently made his first Tweet:

from zero to one http://t.co/TtFsSpVkLP
— Peter Thiel (@peterthiel) September 8, 2014

The title of the book refers to the distinction Thiel draws between transformative, “vertical” change—going from zero to one—and incremental, “horizontal” change—going from one to n.

“If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress,” he explains in the book’s first chapter. “If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.”

According to Thiel, and co-author Blake Masters, information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.

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Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.

"There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley," according to Thiel. "To start a wider conversation, we have refined and expanded on the best ideas from the class to make a richer, fresher, more readable text. Zero to One is about learning from Silicon Valley why and how the most valuable businesses in the world are the ones that solve problems in new ways rather than competing on well-trodden paths."

"If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress."

Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking about the future.

Masters was a student at Stanford Law School in 2012 when his detailed notes on Peter Thiel’s class “Computer Science 183: Startup” became an internet sensation. Before writing Zero to One with Peter, Blake co-founded Judicata, a legal research technology startup, and worked at Box andFounders Fund. He went to Stanford and Stanford Law School, and lives in San Francisco with his wife and baby boy.

Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.

Some of the reviews for Zero to One:

“This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.” 
-  Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook

“Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.” 
-  Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla 

" Zero to One is the first book any working or aspiring entrepreneur must read—period."
- Marc Andreessen, co-creator of the world's first web browser, co-founder of Netscape, and venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz 

"Zero to One is an important handbook to relentless improvement for big companies and beginning entrepreneurs alike. Read it, accept Peter’s challenge, and build a business beyond expectations." 
- Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE 

“When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic.”
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan 

"Peter Thiel, in addition to being an accomplished entrepreneur and investor, is also one of the leading public intellectuals of our time. Read this book to get your first glimpse of how and why that is true."
- Tyler Cowen, New York Times best-selling author of Average is Over and Professor of Economics at George Mason University 

"The first and last business book anyone needs to read; a one in a world of zeroes."
- Neal Stephenson, New York Times best-selling author of Snow Crash, the Baroque Cycle, and Cryptonomicon

By 33rd Square

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