Technology Means Complementarity

PayPal was in 2001 the only email-based payments company in the world. It employed fewer people than the restaurants on Castro Street (Mountain View, CA), where the Paypal team used to go for lunch. The business was much more valuable than all of those restaurants combined. 

Starting a new ...

Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of: 

1. Proprietary technology: 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...

Thiel argues capitalism and competition are opposites. 

Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. 

Because creating value is not enough, you also need to capture some of the val...

The book draws on Thiel's experience as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. Thiel cautions the book offers no formula for success. Such a formula cannot exist as every innovation is new and unique....

Why would someone join your company as its 20th engineer when she could go work at Google for more money and more prestige?

You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important th...

1. The Engineering Question: can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 
2. The Timing Question: is now the right time to start your particular business? 
3. The Monopoly Question: are you starting wit...

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. 

The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and s...

Progress can take one of two forms:

• Going from 1 to n: horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work -. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. 
• Going from 0 to 1: Ve...

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.

The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. 

People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

The quote with which Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina might describe people, but for businesses it's 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 compet...

Every startup is small at the start. Every monopoly dominates a large share of its market. Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market.

The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together an...