Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, 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

what could be a more appropriate reward for two decades of résumé-building than a seemingly elite, process-oriented career that promises to “keep options open”?

In January 2013, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, tweeted to his 2 million followers: “Success is never accidental.”

From the outside, everyone in your company should be different in the same way.

Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.

Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.

Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances…. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” In 1912, after he became the first explorer to reach the South Pole, Roald Amundsen wrote: “Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck, people call it.”

that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.

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. That’s the only thing that can make its importance unique.