Zero to one: Wie Innovation unsere Gesellschaft rettet

Geschrieben von Blake Masters und Peter Thiel

Erzählt von Matthias Lühn

Wir leben in einer technologischen Sackgasse. Zwar suggeriert die Globalisierung technischen Fortschritt, doch das vermeintlich Neue, sind vor allem Kopien des Bestehenden. Thiel, Peter, Silicon-Valley-Insider und in der Wirtschaftscommunity bestens bekannter Innovationstreiber ist überzeugt: Globalisierung ist kein Fortschritt, Konkurrenz ist schädlich und nur Monopole sind nachhaltig erfolgreich. Er zeigt: Wahre Innovation entsteht nicht horizontal, sondern sprunghaft – from Zero to One. Um die Zukunft zu erobern, reicht es nicht, der Beste zu sein. Gründer müssen aus dem Wettkampf des Immergleichen heraustreten und völlig neue Märkte erobern. Wie man wirklich Neues erfindet, enthüllt seine beeindruckende Anleitung zum visionären Querdenken. Ein Appell für einen Start-up der ganzen Gesellschaft.

• Sprache: Deutsch
• Herausgeber: ABOD von RBmedia Verlag
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1. Okt. 2014
• ISBN: 9783954713257

Rezensionen für Zero to one

[jpsnow · Bewertung: 4 von 5 Sternen]

The successful entrepreneur looks for transformative growth by figuring out what common truth is wrong. When applied to market opportunity, combined with the right team and progressive advancements into larger markets, the results far surpass competing on a level playing field.

[jfred-160214 · Bewertung: 3 von 5 Sternen]

Goods bits, but not as actionable as I expected it to be.

[radiohead1985 · Bewertung: 3 von 5 Sternen]

Obviously, one would defer to to Peter Thiel when it comes to making a business, but this book really didn't cut it. I felt there were a lot of generalizations and commentary, and significantly lesser hard research. Regardless of that, the book was a fun read and only 140 pages, and did have SOME golden advice.3 stars.

[markwhiting-479218 · Bewertung: 5 von 5 Sternen]

Very concise, very valuable!

[starkravingmad_1 · Bewertung: 4 von 5 Sternen]

Excellent summary of important points for a successful start-up

[james.igoe · Bewertung: 4 von 5 Sternen]

The End:

I eventually waded back, breezed through the rest of the book, and although I still think the book suffers from profound deficiencies, it is an insightful, thought-provoking work.

The Loathsome Period:

Irecently picked this up where I left off, and I found it so loathsome that I reduced the stars from 4 to 1. The arguments are specious and his conclusions either incorrect or woefully inadequate, except as it pushes the conclusion to his decided end. Granted, there is some truth to his arguments, that believers in the definite future often win out, but he is blind to how those planners visit horrors on the planet, i.e., the Nazi's Master Plan, while believing that only good things come from his archetype.

This book will likely play well with people that are fans of his, tend to aggrandize people like Musk and Apple, but that is its problem. It is no better than a Tony Robbins motivational speech, preaching to the converted.

Initial review:

Insightful, but not really contrarian...

I have understood most of these concepts for several years, partially based on an insight provided in a beginning finance course. On the first day of class, the professor asked, "How do you make money?". The first answer was "word hard," the second answer was "provide services," but no one answered the best one, "control it." Now, one could control money, but over time I realized that it was control of a resource, essentially power, similar to monopoly, or simply an especially strong, market position.

Peter is a persuasive writer, but too often his expression of a belief is lopsided, and at least partially untrue. Yes, the companies he lauds are innovators, but later their innovation is often nothing more than market position, like buying up the entire supply chain before rivals. His example of people who believe in definite futures, as part of path to success, suffers from survivor bias; many entrepreneurs have definite concepts about the future and what they want to do, but most fail, we just don't hear about them.

I could go on, but I did enjoy the book, if for no other reason than it clarified my own thoughts about markets, and it is well-written.

As for the question, my answer would have been that inequality is the greatest threat to modern life. Although seemingly common now, since Occupy, I found the statistical negative correlations between inequality and quality of life measures back in 2003, and back then, it might have ruffled a few feathers. Also, it would be the toughest not because people do not believe it, but because the people I know and work with, as well as the people I have my closest relationships with, would see it as a personal attack. I work in finance, and some people I know and love are well-off.

[publiusdb-1 · Bewertung: 5 von 5 Sternen]

One of the most fascinating books I have read in recent months is Peter Thiel's Zero to One. I am not a tech entrepreneur or even starting a new business. But I found Zero to One so thought provoking and interesting, that I bought it after reading a library copy.

I found myself frequently recommending the book (consider this your recommendation. Go read it. Now), and any book hat Good should be on my shelf for easy access, referral, and lending.

Short and succinct, Peter Thiel's tact seems to take any conventional thinking and toss it on its head, reexamine paradigms, and, at its heart, inspire the reader to create, to make something new. As one of the founders of PayPal and Palantir, one of the first outside investors into Facebook, a funder to SpaceX and LinkedIn, Thiel has a track record of finding and funding industry and society changing companies.

Perhaps what I liked most about Thiel, though, is his emphasis on putting learning before university. As a high school drop-out, I've long believed in the importance of not allowing your schooling to get in the way of your education. While he doesn't spend much time talking about this in Zero to One, his focus on out of the box thinking runs throughout the book. It's hard in today's culture to swim against the current. It's one thing to take an idea that someone else has created and to perfect it, or market it, or to improve on it, but it is an entirely different thing to create something totally new. Hence, to go from 0 to 1 is Thiel's focus. As he puts it, the next Bill Gates will not build an operating system, the next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine, and the next Steve Jobs won't invent an iPod. And Thiel's book is about that most difficult of steps, the creation, rather than adding or modifying something familiar.

The book is short, punchy, and far more anecdotal than quantitative, but Thiel's style--and resume--make it a compelling and thought-provoking read, even for non-entrepreneurs. In a sense, we are all entrepreneurs in that it is when we get outside of our paradigms that we begin to truly create our better selves. Perhaps that is why I found it interesting and in a sense inspiring. I'm coming up on my 40th year, and still find myself looking to the future and what I will someday become. But the closer I get to that future the more I realize that it is already here. I'm living in it. Today is as good a day as any to make that future reality.

[fouad_bendris · Bewertung: 4 von 5 Sternen]

Definitively a must read book for “101 Entrepreneur Starting Business from Zero ” !Business Cases are chosen on purpose - Startup spirit is not enough and therefore having kind of modus operandi will be precious help for Startupers ;() Last but not least – it is always a blessing to receive advice from experienced people … Aug, 12 th - 2016

[felipedominguez-1 · Bewertung: 5 von 5 Sternen]

I began to listen to the audiobook version of this book, and after 10 minutes it became apparent that I needed to purchase and own a copy of this book. Peter's ideas are in many cases way out of the box and defy convention about business, economics and academia that are held dear to many.
Each sentence is carefully crafted and many short phrases in the book teach profound principles of the Thiel gospel. Given the fact that Thiel does not publish much of his ideas, this book is a rare insight into the mind of a truth seeker, who does not use convention as a shortcut.

[darwa-3 · Bewertung: 5 von 5 Sternen]

It seems that most of the business or marketing books that I read lately say pretty much the same thing, almost as if they are regurgitating the same business book with a different author. Peter Thiel gives fresh insight into what it take to build a start up. Really enjoyed the book.

[droider-3 · Bewertung: 5 von 5 Sternen]

This book is based on a collection of notes taken by Blake Masters for a class on entrepreneurship thought by Peter Thiel.

[brikis98 · Bewertung: 3 von 5 Sternen]

This book fluctuates between brilliance and madness. When it focuses on the mechanics of start ups, it's great. When it focuses on Thiel's philosophies, it's a bit whacky. Thiel enjoys being a contrarian too much. Doing something new and valuable may require being a contrarian, but just being contrarian doesn't mean your ideas are new and valuable. Worth reading if you're interested in startups, but be prepared to skim and shake your head.

Pros:

* Great chapters on how to build a monopoly, approach markets, luck, hiring, culture, and sales.

* lots of contrarian views that will force you to reconsider your own ideas

* Interesting outlook on the future of technology and humanity

* Clear writing

Cons:

* The ideas of vertical vs horizontal progress is nonsense. All ideas are horizontal, built incrementally on top of all the ideas that came before by people who came along at the right time and place. This includes the ideas behind paypal and palantir.

* Limited perspective on competition. It exists. It leads to better products for consumers. It hurts some businesses, but drives others to greatness.

* I disagree with Thiel's negative view of education. Yes, higher ed is too expensive and can be done better, but that's not the same as eliminating it. And if you want to change it, then have your companies stop filtering candidates by college degree.

* Dismissing a broad curriculum and saying everyone should study just one thing is absurd coming from a lawyer turned businessman who likes to quote a very wide array of human knowledge, including philosophy, history, physics, mathematics, medicine, economics, and mythology. It's also absurd since the fusion of ideas from different disciplines is what leads to much of innovation.

* Comparing hipsters to the uni bomber? Really?

Fun quotes:

As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage. Anything less than an order of magnitude better will probably be perceived as a marginal improvement and will be hard to sell, especially in an already crowded market.

By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.

But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

As globalization advances, people perceive the world as one homogeneous, highly competitive marketplace: the world is “flat.” Given that assumption, anyone who might have had the ambition to look for a secret will first ask himself: if it were possible to discover something new, wouldn’t someone from the faceless global talent pool of smarter and more creative people have found it already? This voice of doubt can dissuade people from even starting to look for secrets in a world that seems too big a place for any individual to contribute something unique.

The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.

Every great company is unique, but there are a few things that every business must get right at the beginning. I stress this so often that friends have teasingly nicknamed it “Thiel’s law”: a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.

You can’t accomplish anything meaningful by hiring an interior decorator to beautify your office, a “human resources” consultant to fix your policies, or a branding specialist to hone your buzzwords. “Company culture” doesn’t exist apart from the company itself: no company has a culture; every company is a culture. A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.

All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity.

The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.

It’s better to think of distribution as something essential to the design of your product. If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.

Tthe seven questions that every business must answer:

1. The Engineering Question
Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?

2. The Timing Question
Is now the right time to start your particular business?

3. The Monopoly Question
Are you starting with a big share of a small market?

4. The People Question
Do you have the right team?

5. The Distribution Question
Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?

6. The Durability Question
Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?

7. The Secret Question
Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don't see?

[justindtapp · Bewertung: 3 von 5 Sternen]

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
This book is touted by many as the "Business Book of the Year" for 2014, so I was eager to read it. If it really is the best biz book of 2014, then it's a disappointment. Thiel writes that the book is compiled from notes of his course lectures at Stanford's business school. Forbes Magazine got it partly right, Thiel's weakness is his attempt at amateur philosophy. He quotes Marx and Engels frequently, blasts Rawls and his contemporaries, and even ends with a critique of Ayn Rand. Tyler Cowen praises the book, but I think that's mainly because Thiel's hypothesis about the future of technology and the labor force jives with Cowens' in Average is Over.

There are some contradictions within the book's chapters that I hope Thiel's students raise in class. The author's personal anecdotes from his various start-ups such as Paypal are interesting, but one senses he has huge cognitive biases-- he assumes he's the smartest person in the room. Much of the book reads like a standard microeconomics or managerial economics text-- what is competition, what is monopoly, etc. Thiel's ideas are Marxist in that he believes capitalism is destroying itself via competition. He writes that "capitalism" is a misnomer since profits get competed away. "The more we compete, the less we gain." We have an absurd system of government-enforced property rights where one hand grants monopoly (patents) while the other prosecutes it (antitrust prosecution).

It should be obvious, but his venture capital firm searches out start-ups that they think have the best shot at developing a monopoly. He writes much on how to capture dominant market share:

1. Proprietary technology - Create a product that is 10 times better than its closest substitute. Invent something new, or completely different.

Thiel writes that people with Aspergers do well in Silicon Valley because they do things differently, they do not follow the crowds. He looks for contrarians when he interviews people, asking job candidates "What's something you believe that others do not?" However, he would seem to contradict himself as later in the book he critiques Ayn Randian solo crusaders. Stanford MBAs all carry Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, they're mostly carbon copies of one another-- and that's the problem.

2. Capture network effects - Make being part of the network essential. People use PayPal because it's popular-- a lot of others use it. Go after small markets where network effects will take hold faster.

3. Achieve economies of scale - High fixed costs, low marginal costs. Achieve scale quickly and keep competitors from being able to enter without a lot of help.

4. Brand - aka differentiation, value proposition, etc. "Brand" is a code word for monopoly.

Apple is an example of a company that accomplished all four of the above.

Thiel hates the modern idea that success is largely a product of chance and circumstances, which was popularized recently by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. Thiel wants to eradicate Rawls and Gladwell from our universities, and eliminate pollsters from politics who make winning seem like pure statistical probability, and teach everyone that success comes from effort and winning. He does not seem to think his own birth into an educated German household that happened to migrate to America had anything to do with his own success.

The author decries the modern sense of pessimism, pointing out that the 1800s Industrial Revolution was a very optimistic time, even though living standards were quite less than today. Optimism birthed creativity which brought productivity and greater prosperity, all the way through the Reagan 1980s. Now, everyone is skeptical and bought into the belief that success is luck or beyond most to achieve.

Thiel gives some insight into how his VC fund vets prospective companies for investment. He studies the founders and examines their background and personal chemistry. He looks for companies that have found a secret. Secrets are important, the key to any startup's success is to find secrets that are hidden in plain sight-- like Uber and Dryve. Keep your secret hidden from some, but not all, find that "golden mean" between disclosure and non-disclosure.

Other observations from Thiel that are pretty textbook:
Organizations should be run by interchangeable managers rather than dynamic individuals.(This is generally the purpose of a board of directors, to free up the dynamic individual to be the creative frontman). Never let your board exceed five people, three is ideal. The bigger the board, the less effective the oversight. Thiel only invests in companies where the CEO is dependent on profit, or takes the lowest salary to mitigate the principle-agent problem. He demands that firms demand "total commitment" from employees.

Thiel also writes of the Power Law, or the 80-20 rule. "The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined." Returns are not normally distributed, the author writes Taleb-like. Can you be a power? Obviously, if you could identify the grand champion, you'd be rich.Thiel seems to suggest he has an ability to spot the champion. "You are not a lottery ticket," he writes, but I disagree. Thiel himself writes that his friend Elon Musk got lucky in his timing, securing crucial federal funding for Tesla right before the green bubble burst and such investment became anathema.

Social entrepreneurship-- people who combine non-profit ideas with for-profit enterprises, come under fire from Thiel. They may aim for social impact, but are they actually good for society? Thiel heavily critiques the companies that got squashed when the green energy bubble burst. He refused to invest in "greens that wore suits." Solyndra is one of many examples of green energy companies that had poor management, silly ideas, and unrealistic projections. Tesla is the one exception, because Tesla answers the "seven questions:"

1. The Engineering Question: Do you have a breakthrough technology?
- is it 10x better than the alternative?
“Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work— going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.”

2. The Timing Question: Is your timing right?
3. The Monopoly Question: Do you have something no-one else has?
4. The People Question: Do you have the right people?
"As a general rule, everyone you involve with your company should be involved full-time…anyone who doesn’t own stock options or draw a regular salary from your company is fundamentally misaligned. At the margin, they’ll be biased to claim value in the near term, not help you create more in the future. That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided… If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.”
5. The Distribution Question: Can you sell and market your stuff?
- sales and marketing matter, but Thiel critiques companies who don't have a product 10x greater than others for failing to market. This seems another contradiction.
6. The Durability Question: Will you be still around in 10 years?
- network effects matter here.
7. The Secret Question: Do you know something nobody else does?

Thiel is apparently a die-hard libertarian but ends his book with a critique of Ayn Rand. "Rand's villains were real but her heroes were fake. There is no Galt's Gulch." However, he concludes the book with an exhortation to "think for yourself."

In all, I give this book 3 stars out of 5. It has good stories and a good critique of recent events, such as the green energy bubble, but the philosophy is pretty weak and much of it is textbook material.

[gdemange_2 · Bewertung: 5 von 5 Sternen]

Great book. Brief, to the point with what is possibly an unusual look at what is necessary to create a start up company, a unique new product that is more than a tweaking of what already exists. As an investor and MBA I would put my money with Peter Thiel anytime.