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."

"You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future... in a power law world, you can’t afford not to think hard about where your actions will fall on the curve."

"The clearest way to make a 10x improvement is to invent something completely new. If you build something valuable where there was nothing before, the increase in value is theoretically infinite. A drug to safely eliminate the need for sleep, or a cure for baldness, for example, would certainly support a monopoly business."

The core lesson is that the best and most disruptive companies go "from zero to one," from non-existence to existence, from no solution to solution, from nothing expected to something expected. Most companies, though, go from 1 to 1.1, or 1.1 to 1.11, they don't make a huge disruptive change. To have a lasting impact, you must find a zero and creat... See more

A useful interview question (also for yourself): “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

"Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus."

"Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas."

"We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly... See more

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