Zero to One, Notes on Startups

The Challenge of The Future, Ch 1

"What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"

A good answer looks like: "Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x"

The future is simply the set of all moments yet to come..the world looks different from today...it's going to be different, and it must be rooted in today's world. Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present; good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.

Future progress can take on one of two forms:

Horizontal progress

• copying things that work
• 1 to n
• AKA globalization

Vertical progress

• doing new things
• 0 to 1
• technology

Startup Thinking

New technology tends to come from new ventures — startups...small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better.

• it's hard to develop new things in big organizations
• it's even harder to do it alone

Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done. A new company's more important strength is new thinking.

Party Like It's 1999, Ch 2

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.

Convential beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble.

All Happy Companies are Different, Ch 3

The business version of our contrarian question is: what valuable company is nobody building?

Creating value is not enough — you also need to capture some of the value you create.

Monopoly lies

• usually exagerate the power of their (nonexistent) competition
• disguise their monopoly by framing their market as the union of several large markets
• ex. Google: search engine ∪ mobile phones ∪ wearable computers ∪ self-driving cars

Competitive lies

• understate the scale of competition, define your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition
• exagerate their distinction by defining their market as the intersection of various smaller markets
• ex.: British food ∩ restaurant ∩ Palo Alto

In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money;...only one thing can allow a businesss to transcend the daily struggle for survival: monopoly profits.

Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world.

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.