Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum.”

“But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. “The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.” A drug to safely eliminate the need for sleep, or a cure for baldness, for example, would certainly support a monopoly business.” If you build something valuable where there was nothing before, the increase in value is theoretically infinite. “The clearest way to make a 10x improvement is to invent something completely new. “If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.” 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 contrived academic parallel reality.” “We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. “What valuable company is nobody building?” “The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”

It is better to risk boldness than triviality.

“If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.”Ĭontrarian thinking against Lean Principles: Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.” “Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. “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.”Ī useful interview question (also for yourself): “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” “Today’s “best practices” lead to dead ends the best paths are new and untried.” To have a lasting impact, you must find a zero and create a new paradigm. Most companies, though, go from 1 to 1.1, or 1.1 to 1.11, they don’t make a huge disruptive change. 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.

Thiel zero to one