Author
Peter Thiel
The PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor who argues that competition is for losers.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Peter Thiel studied philosophy and then law at Stanford, worked briefly as a lawyer and a derivatives trader, and in 1998 co-founded the company that became PayPal, which he ran as chief executive through the dot-com crash and its sale to eBay in 2002. He then founded a hedge fund and the venture firm Founders Fund, and in 2004 wrote the first outside cheque into Facebook, a bet that came to define his reputation as an investor.
He also co-founded Palantir, the data-analysis company, in 2003, and started the Thiel Fellowship, which pays young people to leave university and build companies. In 2012 he taught a course on startups at Stanford; a student, Blake Masters, published detailed notes from each lecture online, and the two turned the notes into Zero to One, published in 2014.
The book is his account of what the companies he built and backed had in common: an original idea, a small market owned completely, and an escape from competition. It remains one of the most read and most argued-with startup books of its decade.
The signature
Thiel writes in claims, not hedges. Each chapter of Zero to One makes a strong, contrarian statement, that competition destroys value, that monopolies are good, that most people believe what they believe because others do, and then defends it briskly. His signature question, what important truth do very few people agree with you on, is the whole method in one sentence.