From zero to one

Information about startups or how to create the future

Author Name: Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

The book you're holding talks about how to build companies that innovate. It's based on everything I learned firsthand as a cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, and then as an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. But while I've noticed many patterns—which I've outlined here—it doesn't offer a recipe for success. For entrepreneurship education, the irony is that such a recipe can never exist; every innovation is new and unique, and no textbook can specifically describe how to be innovative. In fact, the one common pattern I've noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles rather than recipes.

This book has its roots in a series of lectures on startups I gave at Stanford University in 2012. College students can become highly skilled in a few disciplines, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world. My primary goal in teaching students was to help them see beyond the paths established by academic disciplines and into the vast future they are responsible for shaping. One of those students, Blake Masters, took detailed notes in class that spread beyond campus. For this book, I worked with him to revise the notes to make them relevant to a broader audience. There's no reason the future has to happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley.