BookYol

Concept

The Seven Questions

The seven questions are Peter Thiel's test for a durable startup, covering engineering, timing, monopoly, people, distribution, durability and secret, and your weakest answer, not your strongest, shows where to work next.

Near the end of Zero to One, Peter Thiel and Blake Masters compress the book's whole argument into a checklist. Is your technology a real breakthrough rather than a small improvement? Is now the right moment for it? Are you starting with a big share of a small market? Do you have the right team? Can you actually get the product to customers? Will your position still hold in ten or twenty years? Have you seen something others missed? Their cautionary tale is the wave of clean-energy startups in the late 2000s. Many of those companies answered few of these questions well and burned through investor money. The point is not to grade yourself generously on all seven. Most companies have a couple of strong answers, and founders feel safe because of them. The test works because it asks all seven at once, so the weakest answer can't hide behind the best one.

A real-life example

A two-person team builds scheduling software for dental clinics. Their engineering is solid, and the timing is good because clinics are moving off paper. Scored honestly, though, distribution is a blank. They have no idea how to reach busy clinic owners who ignore cold email. So they stop adding features. They spend a month testing one channel instead: a partnership with a dental-supply distributor whose reps already visit clinics every week.

How to use it

  1. 1Write one honest sentence answering each of the seven questions. Then mark each answer strong, shaky or missing. If you can't write the sentence, count that answer as missing.
  2. 2Pick the single weakest answer and make it your next project. Resist the urge to polish the answers that already feel good, because that work changes little.
  3. 3Rerun all seven questions every quarter and before you raise money. A strong answer can weaken as markets shift and competitors move.