This naturally results in a decay of innovation if rampant enough (a “race to the bottom”, at least from a profit perspective). Many businesses spend inordinate amounts of time and attention on competition - focused on doing what their competitors are doing, rather than seeking the places their competitors aren’t even going. Thiel’s core belief is that competition is bad for business - a marketplace with perfect competition sees no movement, no dynamism, and no profits to be had by any player. The best pieces of the book discuss competition in markets. Theil’s become well known for his ideas on stagnation and the lack of material technology progress since the 1970s, and he finds a way to insert that narrative into this book, with the hopeful objective of convincing would-be future founders of attacking big, impactful problems. The first half of the book (which is the most interesting) covers his views on competition, markets, and what it means to be a monopoly. It isn’t like your typical book on startups or entrepreneurship, though.

Notes taken by one of his students, Blake Masters, became the foundation for Zero to One, which distills Thiel’s philosophy on the business of technology, Silicon Valley, and how to build startups.Īs the title states, founders should be focused on creating something new rather than seeking to make incremental progress on existing technologies. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new thingsgoing from 0 to 1. Founder and investor Peter Thiel once taught a course at Stanford on startups. Peter Thiels Zero To One: Breakthrough technology can create socially valuable monopolies.

Peter thiel 0 to 1