Book Review: ‘Zero To One’ - Having An Entrepreneur Mindset

Source - Amazon

Introduction

Book’s Name - Zero To One

Author’s Name - Peter Thiel

Language - English

Genre - Entrepreneur, Business, Self-help

About the Author

Source - Time magazine

Peter Thiel (born 11 October 1967) is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, co-founder of the world’s first online money transaction system- Paypal, and a venture capitalist. Peter Thiel has his venture capital firm known as Thiel Foundation which provides $ 1 million investment to youth working on startups.

Peter Thiel worked with Elon  Musk in the creation of Paypal. Also, he has been listed in Forbes’s top 400 richest people with a net worth of U.S $ 6.92 billion as of October 2021.

Peter Thiel released the book ‘Zero to One’ as an author on 16 September 2014. His major investment stakes are in Facebook, SpaceX, Airbnb. Along with investor, Peter Thiel had co-founded CIA backed startup Palantir which manages big security data for the CIA, went to public listing on 2020 

Book Review 

This book speaks about creating a product or a non-existent service or some kind of innovation that could help to make the world a better place. The author talks about how, despite technological stagnation in today’s world, there are a lot of unexplored frontiers which need to be discovered and worked on.

Making things from non-existing entities and bringing the vision to reality is the basic concept of going from zero to one, whereas improving an existing service or a known product is going from 1 to n.

“Why must the progress be limited to computers and silicon valley, progress can be achieved in any fields”

The good part of this book is it links the values and life lessons of entrepreneurs to normal people and inspires every reader to think like an entrepreneur. Apart from values, this book provides fundamental guidance to make a startup of your own.

There are many interesting facts mentioned in this book, some of which talk about building your brand or your identity in such a way that you must have a certain degree of monopoly in the market. The author talks about having more monopoly or monopolistic competition than going for perfect competition. This results in maximum and long-term profitability.

The author mentions a certain set of questions that must be answered for any startup aspirer in a concrete vision of the startup. It’s easy to go from “1 to n” that is iterating on a product but it takes a lot of effort and a strong vision to make “0 to 1”.

“The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether because their businesses will be unique.”

For a successful startup, it’s necessary to start a company with a friend or people you know well, have clear roles and responsibilities, hire full-time employees, have less salary to the founder than your employees, and keep your equity investments confidential.

Peter Thiel speaks about 3 primary marketing strategies consisting of advertisement, personal marketing, and viral marketing. Adapting a viral marketing strategy is one of the best and inexpensive options for any growing startup. Initially, reach out to your family and friends who support you to help in spreading your idea. Build your network and expand the reach like a mass media advertisement does in public.

“Having a good product is not enough, someone has to sell it”

 

The idea of starting a business or a startup and giving structure to a thought process is, in itself, one of the most interesting features to learn from this book. As a reader, Zero To One made me realize having a vision over 10 to 20 years is an important aspect of sustaining and building your career. 

It's very important to have a plan which shapes your goals into reality. One of the important pieces of advice that the book gives, which you could link to, is-

“Having a wrong plan is much better than having no plan”

The Bottom Line

Being merely around 200 pages, the book has no competition to rival business books and lives up to its thesis of building monopoly and capitalism. Overall, Zero to One is an optimistic lookout for readers who want inspiration for their careers and especially a must-read book for entrepreneurs who are looking to build their startups. Enlightening ideology and changing your thought process to think like rich people.

My rating for the book - 4.5/ 5

You can easily buy this book from Amazon - Zero to one

Written By - Prajwal Barate