Zero To One
Book By Peter Thiel
What is Palantir?
A data software company that Peter co-founded.
some cool facts
A South Korean company forced $5 million upon PayPal, now that's cool! (pg. 18)
The March 2000 financing round (before the bubble popped) brought them the time needed for PayPal's success... talk about timing!
Lessons for startups:
- Make incremental advances
- Stay lean and flexible
- Improve on the competition
- Focus on product
An explanaition of these Lessons for startups:
1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward.
2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be "lean," which is code for "unplanned." You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead, you should try things out, "iterate," and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.
3. Improve on the competition Don't try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.
4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it's not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.
These lessons have become dogma in the startup world; those who would ignore them are presumed to invite the justified doom visited upon technology in the great crash of 2000. And yet the opposite principles are probably more correct: 1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality. 2. A bad plan is better than no plan. 3. Competitive markets destroy profits. 4. Sales matter just as much as product.
Another important point in the book is there's a self-serving bias when describing market conditions by both competition and monopolies.
A company with a monopoly would describe the market as having multiple competitors but a company in a competitive market would try to overstate their dominance.
Examples:
Monopoly Description: "We face numerous competitors, ensuring a diverse market."
Competitive Market Description:"We dominate the industry, outpacing all rivals significantly."
A Favorite Quote:
A business either thinks money is important or money is everything.
A monopoly will think the former (because of prosperity) and patents are monopoly tools. Okay, Peter likes monopolies.
A Note on Lawyers and Bankers:
"Indefinitely optimistic future calls for more bankers and lawyers."
🙏🤣 more talking points for me against lawyers!... bankers are on the list too.
This reminds me of my HATE of the lawyer profession and how the very thought of not making anything useful for society freaks me out.
I agree with Naval Ravikant when he says a world with only engineers is the way to go. Peter added bankers to the hate list.
"Annual production capacity from renewables is 420 gigawatts globally in 2014"
what are the numbers now?.....
3870GW
More quotes
"This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket rule: pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings."
"Better Place, which from 2007 to 2012 raised and spent more than $800 million to build swappable battery packs and charging stations for electric cars."
Wow swappable! I've always thought of that.
"The Better Place board of directors stated upon selling the company’s assets for a meager $12 million in 2013, “The technical challenges we overcame successfully, but the other obstacles we were not able to overcome.”"
"What will stop China from wiping out my business?" part of the durability question
"By 2013, shale gas accounted for 34% of America’s natural gas, and gas prices had fallen more than 70% since 2008."
"Most of the world dreams of living as comfortably as Americans do today, and globalization will cause increasingly severe energy challenges unless we build new technology. There simply aren’t enough resources in the world to replicate old approaches or redistribute our way to prosperity."
Part of the reason why Nigeria lacks a good electricity supply, other issues include (according to ChatGPT): Infrastructure Deficiency, Lack of Investment, Corruption and Mismanagement, Energy Theft, Policy and Regulatory Challenges, Economic Factors, Dependency on Fossil Fuels, Population Growth
"Paradoxically, the challenge for the entrepreneurs who will create Energy 2.0 is to think small."
"Howard Hughes built Houston’s first radio transmitter at the age of 11. The year after that he built the city’s first motorcycle. By age 30 he’d made nine commercially successful movies at a time when Hollywood was on the technological frontier."
Wow
"Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition."
So cool