7 Revelations from Peter Thiel's 0 to 1

Peter Thiel together with Elon Musk is a well-known founder of Paypal. He also founded Palantir Technologies, a data science billion dollar company and invested as venture capital in successful companies like Facebook.
In "0 to 1" Peter Thiel collects and shares with the reader good advices about startups, entrepreneurship and society.

1. Dare to think about the future differently

At school you learn discipline and strictness, useful you want to became a good worker. However yo innovate, to make the difference, to build something new, you need to see the world from a different prospective.
Unfortunately, you will not be taught how to do that.

2. Competition is evil

Quoting Thiel's words: "From the point of view of a founder or entrepreneur, you want your company to always be a monopoly. You want to be offering something to the world that no one else is offering, and therefore you have some really healthy profit margins around your business. From the inside, I would argue monopoly is always a good thing. That's what every entrepreneur should attempt to build"

3. Don't hire MBAs

MBA's have a problem with competitions. They always look around them in order to win agains the all the competitors. That's good if you're in a traditional and highly competitive business like an Airline company.
But in a disruptive business you can't focus on what you have around, you need to focus only on what really matters: you and your companies goals.

4. At first, you can’t be the best at everything, you need to start by becoming the best at one thing

You really understand that while working in a startup. If you're a small startup with 8 awesome employees, you can't aim to win against Apple in the Smartphone fields. You need to focus on one simple task, on something big companies are overlooking. And then, when you reach success, you can expand your hedges.
Think about Amazon, they first became the best at selling books online, and then started to sell everything.

5. Solve something people need or love, don’t make a company for the sake of it.

This time, Thiel's words are the best explanation you can have: I’m nervous about people who say they want to be an entrepreneur. That’s like saying I want to be rich or I want to be famous. You don’t want to be starting a business for the sake of it, but because there is a problem that cannot be solved in existing structures.”

6. Invent a disruptive technology or a way to make an existing job 10x better

It is a key difference between success and failure. It means not only a 10x faster services, it means a 10x cheaper products, 10x better employees, 10x better marketing, 10x stronger brand and also a 10x bigger risk :)

You do not have to focus on how to go from 1 to 10, instead focus on how to go from 0 to 1, which is far more unique challenge. This, is what the story is all about. Here, is where most companies fail. Here, is where the truly innovators start their path to success.

7. Globalization is not all progress

Here we are, a very controversial chapter of this awesome book.
According to Peter Thiel, who is right if you think about it, globalization actually work by copying in a developing countries something more or less working from a G7 country. However, if you deal with technology, you need to do exactly the opposite.

This was "7 Lesson from Peter Thiel's 0 to 1", hope you like this post. Please comment and follow me.

Sorry for 5 years old editing and, I'm learning how to do it better :)

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