The world is in an era of expansion and innovation. Is there anything we don’t know or that we cannot discover? For the renowned entrepreneur and investor, Peter Thiel the answer is yes. In his book Zero to One he shows that the greatest little big secret of our era is that there is an enormous amount of inventions to be made and he shows how to create them.
Peter created PayPal in 1998 and made it public in 2002. In 2004 he was the first outside investor of Facebook, and also was an early funder of LinkedIn, Yelp and many others tech startups. His partnership with Founders Fund has helped funding companies like Airbnb and SpaceX. He wrote Zero to One with Blake Master, Peter’s ex-student in a course called Computer Science 183: Startup, and co-founded Judicata, a legal research tech entrepreneurship.
The book starts with the opposing premise that we actually live in a tech-stagnated era. IT has improved quickly but has been limited to computers and alike and Silicon Valley startups. Tech progress can be obtained in each and every industry or business. How? With the utmost skill, every leader must have: thinking by itself.
This means the new kinds of business have a different starting point. Regular businesses that only add details to something already created means you’re going from 1 to x, but doing something new requires going from 0 to 1. The next Steve Jobs won’t build an operating system; the new Larry Page won’t invent a search engine.
Future innovations will not compete in the cruel marketplace of the present. Their businesses will be so unique that they will create a whole new market.
Zero to One gives a positive view of tomorrow’s progress and a creative way of thinking on innovation and business in a comprehensible and friendly manner by making the reader know how to ask the questions a leader must ask to find value and innovate in unforeseen areas.
