Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is a 2014 book by the American entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel co-written with Blake Masters. It is a condensed and updated version of a highly popular set of online notes taken by Masters for the CS183 class on startups, as taught by Thiel at Stanford University in Spring 2012.
Peter Thiel is the co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook. In the Spring of 2012, he gave a lecture course at Stanford for software engineers, calling on them to think boldly and broadly about how they might use their skills to shape the future, and imparting the lessons he has gleaned from his own experience. One of the students in that class – Blake Masters – took notes and posted them online. The blog posts became a huge success, with hundreds of thousands of hits, and became the basis for Zero to One.
We live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by our new mobile devices to notice. Progress has stalled in every industry except computers, and globalization is hardly the revolution people think it is. It’s true that the world can get marginally richer by building new copies of old inventions, making horizontal progress from ‘1 to n’. But true innovators have nothing to copy. The most valuable companies of the future will make vertical progress from ‘0 to 1’, creating entirely new industries and products that have never existed before. Zero to One is about how to build these companies.
A business book that also provides insight into the world of start-ups from a Silicon Valley icon, Thiel shows how to pursue your goals using the most important, most difficult, and most underrated skill in every job or industry: thinking for yourself.
