Author
Blake Masters
The Stanford law student whose lecture notes became Zero to One.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Blake Masters was a law student at Stanford in 2012 when he enrolled in Peter Thiel's course on startups. He took detailed notes on every lecture and posted them online, where they spread far beyond the class; within weeks founders and investors who had never set foot in the room were reading and debating them.
Thiel and Masters then reworked the notes into a book, Zero to One, published in 2014, with Masters credited as co-author. The book kept the lectures' compression and their habit of stating a strong claim and defending it briefly, and it carried the ideas, the contrarian question, secrets, monopoly, starting small, to a much wider audience than the class had reached.
After the book Masters worked with Thiel's investment firm and foundation for several years, and later left the technology world for politics.
The signature
Masters's contribution is the form: the discipline of turning a spoken argument into short chapters that can be read in a sitting and remembered afterwards. Zero to One reads the way good lecture notes read, one idea per section, the example close to the claim, and that shape is his.