Zero to One

August 11, 2014
In his first book, PayPal cofounder Thiel presents a series of musings—for example,“Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1”—rather than a cohesive narrative. He begins with promise, drawing a strict distinction between horizontal progress—making more of what already exists in the world—and vertical progress—creating something entirely new. To accomplish the latter, he proposes, more businesses need to think like startups. From there, the text sprawls wildly from one subject to the next, with periodic references to PayPal’s evolution as the main recurring motif. His provocative central premise is that successful businesses should strive to be monopolies—that readers should build something singular and exciting enough that it will be the only one of its kind. Though the book is presented as an instructional guide, it gives the reader little to take away. A brief meditation on the lessons of the dot-com bust (“make incremental advances,” “stay lean and flexible,” “improve on the competition,” “focus on product, not sales”) offers standard truisms rather than practical insights. Thiel touches on how to build a successful business, but the discussion is too abstract to offer much to the next Steve Jobs—or Peter Thiel.

September 1, 2014
Legendary startup icon and venture capitalist Thiel and Masters reveal how they succeed with startups and why business school graduates most often do not. Known as a co-founder of Paypal and early investor in Facebook and SpaceX, billionaire Thiel and his former student, Masters, are not offering tips on becoming superrich. Surprisingly, they are contemptuous of finance, which they call "the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth." They offer an older model of business based on the potential earnings foreseeable as a by-product of the transformations associated with leaps in technology into unserved spaces in human activity. Paypal and Facebook are good examples. The authors distinguish their own thinking and methods from the orthodoxies of the financial and business communities. Lively and often acerbic, Thiel and Masters leave many of today's business shibboleths trashed along the way. They are unabashed proponents of monopoly to control and secure profit for reinvestment, and they assert, agreeing with thinkers like Walter Lippmann, that "[c]apitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away." In their view, monopoly is how technological innovators successfully change the rules with order-of-magnitude improvements instead of incremental advances. Thiel and Masters provide rules of thumb and case studies drawn from experiences, all bound up with their radically different business methods and practices. Their views on viral marketing and the importance of sales will be of interest to aspiring entrepreneurs, as will their dismissal of current ideas of market and technological disruption. They don't hide their dislike of the use of stock options as incentives for business leadership. Forceful and pungent in its treatment of conventional orthodoxies-a solid starting point for readers thinking about building a business.

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December 1, 2015

In this thought-provoking read, the authors ask readers to reconsider entrenched ideas about how we look at the economics and philosophy of small business.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2014
A self-professed contrarian and proud of it, PayPal cofounder Thiel riffs on a series of his lectures given at Stanford. His major contention? That copycats are not what America needs, calling for, instead, those entrepreneurs who'll challenge convention and build a different, better world. As proof, he dissects, in some details, the dot.com boom and contrasts its faux learnings (e.g., make incremental advances) from the truthbetter to risk boldness than triviality. Why monopolies, beginning with small market/niche domination, will win. The mechanics of cofounders and establishing a company cult. An investigation into the failures of clean techwith one notable exception: Tesla. The one question to ask: What valuable company is no one building? Thiel pokes at and prods every corner of business, from recruiting to advertising and competition, never shy about his opinions. Two samples: Too many people are starting their own companies today and All Rhodes scholars had a great future in their past. Irreverent, with the disclaimer that truth can be stranger than fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)