Peter Thiel is the co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook. In the Spring of 2012, he gave a lecture course at Stanford for software engineers, calling on them to think boldly and broadly about how they might use their skills to shape the future, and imparting the lessons he has gleaned from his own experience. One of the students in that class - Blake Masters - took notes and posted them online. The blog posts became a huge success, with hundreds of thousands of hits, and became the basis for Zero to One. We live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we're too distracted by our new mobile devices to notice. Progress has stalled in every industry except computers, and globalization is hardly the revolution people think it is. It's true that the world can get marginally richer by building new copies of old inventions, making horizontal progress from '1 to n'. But true innovators have nothing to copy. The most valuable companies of the future will make vertical progress from '0 to 1', creating entirely new industries and products that have never existed before. Zero to One is about how to build these companies. A business book that also provides insight into the world of start-ups from a Silicon Valley icon, Thiel shows how to pursue your goals using the most important, most difficult, and most underrated skill in every job or industry: thinking for yourself.
Editorial Review
Crisply written, rational and practical, Zero to One should be read not just by aspiring entrepreneurs but by anyone seeking a thoughtful alternative to the current pervasive gloom about the prospects for the world - The Economist
About the Author
Peter Thiel is a technology entrepreneur and investor best known for co-founding PayPal. Since then he has co-founded the data analytics firm Palantir Technologies, made the first outside investment in Facebook, provided early funding for companies like SpaceX, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Spotify, and established and funds the Thiel Foundation, which nurtures tomorrow's tech visionaries. He has appeared on 60 Minutes, CNBC, CBS Sunday Morning, Bloomberg News and been featured in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, The Atlantic, USA Today, BusinessWeek, and more.
Blake Masters is co-founder of Judicata, a technology start-up that builds tools for legal research and analysis. Like Peter, Blake received undergraduate and law degrees from Stanford.