Review – Zero to One

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, Or How to Build the Future

by Peter Thiel, published 2014

No wonder Peter Thiel is encouraging young people to avoid college and start companies– if the best lecture on startup entrepreneurship is Peter Thiel’s Stanford class-turned-book, it’s clear how vapid the value offering is in the average college course.

Thiel encourages the reader to build companies that make the world a better place on a principled basis, and he strongly advises to avoid competitive markets. And while he says that the book is not and can not be a how-to book for starting a company but rather a set of guidelines for how to think about what it takes to succeed as a startup, the book’s content doesn’t appear revelatory for any but the most amateur business mind. Maybe it would shock some people to learn they have to have a plan for selling their product, not just designing it, but if that’s the level you’re at (or that’s the “truth” you’re wedded to), is Peter Thiel’s book really going to be the bridge between your idea and massive success? Or any success?

It reads much more as a personal journal, reflecting on funny stories and anecdotes about Thiel’s own success with PayPal, than it seems to be a guide to entrepreneurship principles. Most of the “rules” are validated by some quirky thing that happened to Thiel and his mafia, for example, deciding not to invest in green energy companies because their CEOs were too well dressed and everyone knows real tech people wear tshirts and jeans. Huh?

It is also more useful as a descriptive work that explains entrepreneurship phenomena witnessed after the fact, rather than anything with a predictive quality to it. In other words, few entrepreneurship success stories will have failed to check the various boxes Thiel covers, but it’s also likely that many failures will have checked them, too. The book provides more insights into questions such as, “Why did Company X manage to grow so rapidly in Market Y?” rather than answering such questions as “How can Company X grow rapidly in Market Y?”

I was much more impressed by Thiel’s short speech pre-election to the National Press Club, outlining his reasons for supporting Donald Trump:

You can disagree with his reasons and his choice, but there is clearly a set of principles he believes in and an overall framework for understanding social issues that guided him to throw in his lot with Trump. That’s more educational than this book, unfortunately.