Every moment in business happens only once.
The next Bill Gates will not build an
operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin wont make a search engine.
And the next Mark Zuckerberg wont create a social network. If you are copying
these guys, you arent learning from them.
Of course, its easier to copy a model than to make something new.Doing what we
already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something
familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of
creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh
and strange.
Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, companies will fail in
the future no matter how big their profits remain today. What happens when we
have ained everything to be had from fine-tuning the old lines of business that we
have inherited ? Unlikely as it sounds, the answer threatens to be far worse than the
crises of 2008. Todays best practices lead to dead ends; the best paths are new
and untried.
In a world of gigantic administrative bureaucracies both public and private,
searching for a new path might seem like hoping for a miracle. Actually, if American
business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands, of
miracles. This would be depressing but for one crucial fact;humans are
distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these
miracles technology.
Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do more with less, ratcheting up
our fundamental honeycombs, but we are the only ones that can invest new things
and better ways of making them. Humans dont decide what to build by making
choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance; instead, by creating
new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world. These are the kind of
elementary truths we teach to second graders, but they are easy to forget in a
world where so much of what we do is repeat what has been done before.
Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on
everything I have learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an
investor in hundreds of startups, including Faceook and SpaceX. But while I have
noticed many patterns, and I relate them here, this is thatbook offers no foirmula for
success. The paradox of teaching enterpreneuship is that such a formula necessarily
cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can
prescribe in concrete terms how to innovative. Indeeed, 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.
This book stems from a course about startups that I taught at Stanford in 2012.
College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never
learn what to do with those skills in the wider world. My primary goal in teaching the
class was to help my students see beyond the tracks laid down by academic
specialties to the broader future that is theirs to create. One of those students,
Blake Masters, took detailed class notes, which circulated far beyond the campus,
and in Zero to One I have worked with him to revise the notes for a wider audience.
Theres no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college,or in
Silicon Valley.
