Zero to one - Peter Thiel

Información Breve.

Notas

Chapter 1: The challenge of the future

• Monopolios y competencia: Thiel sostiene que los monopolios son buenos para la innovación y que la competencia puede ser perjudicial, ya que las empresas pueden quedar atrapadas en una lucha constante por el mercado, sin enfocarse en ideas nuevas y transformadoras.
• La ley de las startups: Thiel propone que una startup debe centrarse en un mercado pequeño y nicho antes de expandirse a mercados más grandes. Esto permite a la startup establecerse como líder en su campo y minimizar la competencia.
• La importancia de la tecnología: Thiel enfatiza que las empresas tecnológicas tienen un potencial único para generar cambios significativos y crear valor a largo plazo.
• El poder de las personas: Thiel sostiene que la calidad de las personas que conforman una startup es esencial para su éxito. Es fundamental seleccionar a los empleados adecuados y mantener una cultura empresarial sólida.
• Planificación y visión del futuro: Thiel aconseja a los emprendedores que piensen a largo plazo y tengan en cuenta cómo sus acciones de hoy afectarán el futuro.

Chapter 2: Party like its 1999

• lessons from the past. Excessive optimism
• Cash flow and profitability

Chapter 3: All happy companies are different

• Each company is unique

Chapter 4: Ideology of competition

• Better to be a monopoly rather than compete

Chapter 5: Last Mover Advantage

• Company can generate a monopoly by analyzing a specific market

Chapter 6: You are not a lottery ticket

• Doesn’t exist

Chapter 7: follow the money

• Power of law exists
• The most single thing is the most powerful
• One distribution strategy domintes others
• Pareto principle

Chapter 8: secrets

• easy -> hard -> impossible
• if ther are many secrets left in the world, there are pro many big companies yet to be started
• Kaczynski argued all world’s problems are solved, what is lef is easy or impossible. So Destroy existing institutions, tech, and let people start over
• Four social trends have conispired to root out belief in secrets: incrementalism, risk aversion, compacency, flatness
• Forty years ago not all knowledge was widely known, people thought they could join a group vanguard that would show them the Way
• To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices
• HP having behind the search for tech secrets, got obsessed over gossip and valued 23$ billion on 2012 (135$ billion on mid 2000)
• The actual trut is that there are many more secrets left to find, they will ield only to relentless searchers
• The same reason internet compaines are underestimadted, bcoz their very simplicity, is itself an argument for secrets
• What secrets is nature not telling you? what secrets are people not telling you?
• Competition and capatialism are opposites
• The best place to look or secrets is where no one else is looking
• Every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from outside

Chapter 9: foundations

• Bad desicions made early on are hard to fix later, a great company cannot be built on flawed foundations
• Everyone in the company have to engage and self-identify with the project, not just the founders
• It is ver hard to go from 0 to 1 without a team
• Role concepts:
  • Ownership: who owns the company
  • Possession: who runts the company in a daily basis
  • Control: who governs the company’s affairs
• Rewarding of work should be power of possession rather than a value of ownership
• Most conflicts are Ownership vs Control (founders vs investros). Board members want a company public, founders prefer to stay private
• A board of 3 people is ideal, it should never exceed five people
• As general rule, everyone in the company should be a full-time worker. Consultants and part-time employees doesn’t work. You’re either on the bus or off the bus
• Low CEO’s salary sets the standard for everyone else
• Startups don’t pay high salaries instead part ownership or Equity for a future value
  • Anoyone preference of ownership is a sign of long-term and commitment with the company
• Setting rules just right the company if founded is key to creation of value in the future
  • As long the company keeys creating new things it lives otherwise it just stops

Chapter 10: The mechanics of mafia

• A startup is people on a mission and good culture
• Time is most valuable asset, don’t spend it with people that don’t envision long-term future together
• In order to hire people, they have to enjoy working together and be talented
• You will attract your employees if your mission is compelling
• The startup uniform, everyone shuold be different in the same way
• Everyone in the company is responsible for doing just one thing
• Most conflicts in a company occurs when colleages compete for the same role
  • Eliminate competition, build kinds of lon-term relationship
• Better to be called a cult or even a mafia

Chapter 11: If you build it, will they come?

• 3 giant ships:
  • ship1: thinkers, leaders and archievers
  • ship2: salespeople and consultants
  • ship3: workers and artisans
• Customers won’t come just bcoz you built it
• Advertising matters because it works. Sales is important
  • It takes hard work to make sales look easy
  • All salesman are actors, they persuate, they are not 100% sincere
  • Like acting, sales works best when hidden
• If you’ve invented something new but you don’t know how to sell it. Bad business
• Superior sales and distribution create a good monopoly
• The higher the price the difficult to sale
• Compex sells are when you don’t have a “salesmen”
• Once you have a pool of reference custtomers who uses your product then you can go next toward bigger deals
• Sometimes the product itself is a kind of distribution
• Distribution is the hidden bottleneck
• Marketing and ads are for low-priced products and lack on methods of viral distributions
• TV is a great big megaphone
• No early-stage startup can pay what big companies pay for Advertising
• If a product is viral users invite their friends
• Banners ads is more expensive than paying users to signup
• Get the most valuable users first, most obvious market segment
• Distribution follows a power law of its own
• Poor sales is the cause of failures
• Selling your company to the media is selling it to everyone else.
• What google stores about your company is critical
• Everyone has a product to sell. If you don’t see any sales people, you’re the salesperson

Chapter 12: Man and machine

• Will there be anything left to do? Sotware is eating the world
• The best way to create productivity is to get rid of people
• Computers are complements for humans, it empower people
  • man-machine symbiosis
• USA workers worried about competition (cheaper mexican substitutes). People compete for jobs and resources, computers neither
• Globalization means substitution
• Workers willing to do repetitive tasks for small wage is large
• Better tech in law, medicine, education won’t replace professionals, it will allow them to do more
• If linkedin had tried replace recruiters with tech they would failed today
• Question: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?

Chapter 13: Seeing green

• eng question: can you create breakthrough tech instead of incremental improvements?
• timing question: is wnot the right time to start your particular business?
• monopoly question: are you starting with a big share of small market?
• people question: do you have the right team?
• distribution question: do you have a way to not just create but delivery your product?
• Only when product is 10x better you offer transparent supriority
• Customers won’t care about tech details unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way
• The best sales is hidden
• CEO who looks like a salesman, is probably bad at sales and worse at tech
• Selling and deliverying is important as the product itself
• What will the world look like in 10-20 years and how will my business fit in?
• What will sto pChine from wiping out my business?
• Great companies have secrets, specific reasons for success that other people dont’ see
• Doing something different is what’s truly good for society. Allows business to profit by monopolizing a new market
• Globalization will cause increasingly severe energy challenges unles we build new tech
• An enrepreneu can’t benefit from macroscale insight without starting at microscale
• A valuable business must start by finding a niche and dominate small market

Chapter 14: The founders paradox

• Important for a company to be led by a distinctive individual instead of an interchangeable manager
• Some people are strong, some weak, some geniuses, some dullards, but most people are in the middle
• Famouse people are founders too. Personal brand.
• Apple’s value depends on the vision of a particular person (… used to depend)
• The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind

Stagnation or Singularity

• Without new tech to relieve competitive pressures, stagnation erupts into conflict. In a global conflict, stagnation collapses into extinction. We create technology to make a a better future
• Future won’t happen on its own.
• We cannot assume future will be better, we need to work for it today
• We have todo new things in our own working lives
• Everything important to us is singular (universe, planet, country, your company, your life)
• Find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future better

Comentarios

Los puntos importantes del libro:

• Monopolio es bueno: para controlar y dominar mercado
• De 0 a 1: es mejor crear que copiar
• Dinámica de la ley de potencia: pequeñas apuestas generan mas ganancias
• Suerte: no existe, es simplemente esfuerzo (planeamiento y estrategias)
• Iniciar de a poco y escalar: enfocarse en mercados pequeños, dominar y escalar
• Secretos: oportunidades ocultas
• Ventaja del último jugador: llegar al mercado al final con un producto perfeccionado
• Ventas: el producto puede ser genial pero sin forma de llegar al mercado, no sirve
• Equipo unido: fuerte y alineado equipo con los objetivos claros
• El futuro: pensar a largo plazo y orientar las estrategias

Research

• How company stocks work