Book detail: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book explores the principles and strategies for creating successful startups and shaping the future of business and technology.
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“If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now?”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready-for nothing in particular.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“If they don't go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“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 competition.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Google makes so much money that it’s now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“What valuable company is nobody building?”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“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 that no one else is going to get done.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don't disrupt: Avoid competition as much as possible.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Moving first is a tactic, not a goal.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“A company does better the less it pays the CEO.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Anyone who prefers owning part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company's value in the future.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks’ time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like in 10 or 20 years from now.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Because globalization and technology are different modes of progress, it’s possible to have both, either, or neither at the same time. For example, 1815 to 1914 was a period of both rapid technological development and rapid globalization. Between the First World War and Kissinger’s trip to reopen relations with China in 1971, there was rapid technological development but not much globalization. Since 1971, we have seen rapid globalization along with limited technological development, mostly confined to IT.
This age of globalization has made it easy to imagine that the decades ahead will bring more convergence and more sameness. But I don’t think that’s true. [...] Most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India’s hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do—using only today’s tools—the result would be environmentally catastrophic. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work—going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.”
Source: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future