Zero to One - Peter Thiel

Overall

This book describes the ideology behind Silicon Valley start-ups, more generally, what makes a fresh hi-tech company really valuable.

Business growth

Before doing that, there’s clear contrast about how business growth happens:

• ‘zero to one’, or ‘technology innovation’, this means creating new technology several times better than status quo.
• ‘one to many’, or ‘globalization’, which means proliferation of technology

‘All happy companies are different.’

The most memorable part is the discussion about monopoly, however it’s not the every day monopoly we know about control of resources. For a tech company, achieving monopoly is equal to creating a product/service so good that it owns the entire market.

In the dynamic world we live, this can be achieved by both approaches above. However much it’s much more doable from zero to one.