“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.”
“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
“The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”
“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.”
“As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”
“The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.”
“As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.”
“As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.”
“The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.”
“Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1.”
National Public Radio: Peter Thiel In 'Zero To One': How To Develop The Developed World
Financial Pipeline: Review of “Zero to One”