Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

I just finished reading Peter Thiel’s book: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. The book is full of interesting lines. Here’s a sample: 

“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 Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”

“Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse.”

“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.” 

“Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.” 

“Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.”

“That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. 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.”

Socialism, Capitalism and the Hegelian Mythology of Reason

The Western systems of capitalism and socialism are unworkable, because they are based on the pseudo-secular Hegelian mythologies which stipulate that history is the progress of human condition till perfection is attained through the dawn of Age of Reason. 

Hegel defined three epochs of history: the Age of the Orient, the Age of the Greeks, and the Age of Reason. The Western capitalists and the socialists have been at war with each other in the last 100 years. Some of the most violent conflicts of the 20th century have been the wars between these two Western groups. The capitalists claim that they are the world’s only repository of reason. They label the socialists as nihilists, irrationalists and collectivists. The socialists counter them with the claim that only socialism and communism can usher mankind into the mythical Age of Reason, and they label the capitalists as imperialists, bourgeois and anti-poor. 

Both are wrong. The so-called Age of Reason is a myth because the working of the human mind and the nature of the universe are beyond human understanding. We have no way of identifying which choices we make on an individual level or on the level of society are based on reason and which are based on mythologies, emotions, delusions, fears, and political and social agendas. Humans are incapable of looking at the universe through only reason. Hegel believed that he was the world’s most perfect embodiment of reason. But his philosophy is wholly irrational and mythological.

On Capitalism & Socialism

Capitalism and socialism are good at accumulating power, wealth and information. But they are not successful in acquiring wisdom. Being bereft of wisdom, the culture in capitalist and socialist societies is an easy prey to atheism and nihilism.