Zero to One, by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters | Hacker News Reader

Zero to One, by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

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130 pointsbeniaminmincu62 comments

> Progress comes from monopoly, not competition.

Okay, that was a surprise. I get the idea that one should work on new things, that merely trying to out-compete is counter-productive (competition is a zero-sum game after all).

On the other hand, some benefits may only come when there's enough players that compete with each other. Take Virtual Reality, for instance. There's the Occulus Rift, Now Sony is working on it, there was valve… at one point, there will be enough player to make a market for low-latency, low-persistence, high-frequency, ridiculous-resolution flat panels. The smartphone industry pushed in that direction of course, but the limit of what's useful for this industry is clearly not enough for VR. Anyway, with this new market, VR will improve as a whole. Without the competition that is currently forming, I think those miraculous flat panels wouldn't come out as fast as they will. That said, those folks are still working on something new…

---

Now that I think of it, maybe he was talking about maximizing one's marginal impact? Like, let the Occulus people work on their Rift alone, and try and work on something different. Even if that slows the VR revolution down, we may now have two revolutions. Hmm…

Seems like an odd theory on the heels of three counter examples. Bill Gates didn't create the first OS, Larry and Sergey didn't create the search engine, and Mark Zuckerberg didn't build the first social network.

exactly. given that, if you want to be the next Bill Gates or Larry & Sergey or Mark Zuckerberg then you should focus on spotting some new but already existing invention and crate a competitor that is just slightly better then the original.

Yes, but most people don't know that. They started using computers on Windows, their first social network account was on Facebook, and their first Internet search was performed on Google. Therefore, even if the examples are not technically accurate, they are still extremely effective at getting Thiel's point across.

But any point where the strongest examples aren't "technically true" and therefore rely on a common misconception is a pretty weak argument. Either Thiel's point is weak, or he means something else.

I suspect he means doing those things (search engine, OS, social network) in a way no one else had.

There are two forces at work there. First is that without being granted a monopoly by force, only really smart people manage to monopolize an industry (think Google).

The benefit monopolies offer is not just that they’re good investments, but that they concentrate wealth in the hands of someone smart enough to monopolize something. Wealth tends towards entropy, so brief concentrations of it are a beautiful thing. And while markets are great at optimizing the last .1% increase in efficiently for a known process, they suck at paradigm shifts—unless there’s someone really smart with enough money to singlehandedly shift that paradigm. Google’s near monopoly on search has probably hastened the arrival of self-driving cars by a few years, saving numerous lives. Score one for monopolies! Even my least favorite monopoly, USG, has deployed money in interesting and otherwise infeasible projects, such as landing on the moon and defeating the USSR.[1]

Second is integration and incentive structure.

One simple robust solution to the innovation problem would seem to be manic monopolists: one aggressively-profit-maximizing firm per industry. Such a firm would internalize the entire innovation problem within that industry, all the way from designers to suppliers to producers to customers – it would have full incentives to encourage all of those parties to put nearly the right amount and type of efforts into innovation.[2]

[1] http://oddblots.tumblr.com/post/85817835358/stoptheslowlane-...

[2] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/04/rah-manic-monopolists....

Yeah, very smart people are exactly who we want driving innovation. Just like how Thomas Edison and his monopolizing Edison Trust brought American electrical systems into the future by embracing AC power, instead of clinging to clearly inferior DC power for as long as possible.

</sarcasm>

If you expect monopolies to drive innovation, you're going to be disappointed. A monopoly doesn't promote paradigm shifts or destructive innovation. In fact, historically speaking, monopolies often take drastic steps to ruthlessly crush any such innovation.

In your second link, at least Robin acknowledges that, historically, there is no reason to expect monopolies to behave as described. Actually, the idea of a "manic monopolist" is fairly interesting. But, if a corporation already controls an industry, how do we incentivize it to take risks by promoting rapid innovation in that industry?

Yeah, I dont want smart people driving innovation. I want everyone to have the freedom to create and live their lives free and unhindered by the threat of violence, the encroachment of propaganda, or economic bullying- even if the bully is able to rationalize his actions.

This idea of giving all the smartest people the money is interesting- in the way that eugenics was interesting.

You can't know how the world would look if Google didn't have a monopoly, but instead there would be more competition. For example, advertising would plausibly cost less, which would mean that a million companies would have less expenses, and therefore more money to invest.

In AdWords, which is 90%+ of Google's revenue, advertising prices that advertisers pay are set by advertisers, not by Google.

If you look at competition as a form of mimicry, then yes, true innovation is almost impossible.

On the opposite end is the Blue Ocean Strategy. There's no competition because it's essentially a new product or service - an innovation. And that business is in a monopolistic position.

The creation of a monopoly has always resulted in a great impact on the world (possibly because the world wouldn't accept a monopoly that didn't do great things). What that monopoly ends up doing with its power/resources is an entirely different matter.

I would suggest he finishes his other book, "The Blueprint", first, since it is "pre-ordered" on Amazon for two years now... Talk about a slow launch.

It looks like it was cancelled because the premise of it was wrong (that technologically innovation is stalling and something needs to be done to revive it).

This time he hired "Blake Masters" to actually write the book.

Blake is a real guy and a friend of mine. Remove the scare quotes please?

Why should he have to remove the "scare quotes" because he happens to be a friend of yours.

Blake is a real guy

Can confirm: I met him once, briefly, in San Francisco.

"ZERO TO ONE is about how to build companies that create new things.", but then as an example uses: "The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine."

Maybe my history is not that good, but as far as I know Bill gates didn't build the first operating system, and when he bought 86-DOS, its success was mainly thanks to IBM. Same for Google, it wasn't the first search engine, it just improved on an existing concept.

Your history is fine, but you should maybe work on your ability to distinguish between things that are "true" and "true, but irrelevant in this context"

Irrelevant how?

Is it irrelevant that the examples fail to back up the assertion because Peter Thiel is the one making it?

The 'big idea' expressed in this blurb is that it's 'easier to copy a model than to make something new.'

And the supporting arguments show off the opposite case just to associate the book with becoming the next industry defining billionaire.

Whoever wrote this blurb is either not thinking clearly, or is banking on readers to not think clearly.

There are much better example cases for that argument, but they aren't as flashy.

The point is that the first mature dominant players in those markets were Microsoft and Google. That's not to say that the dominant player can't be challenged, it's just that the next 100 billion dollar company will start in a new market with no mature dominant player (e.g. Facebook on social networks).

Altavista was dominant when Google entered the fray. MySpace was dominant when FB took off.

Whenever there is space for innovation and the incumbent does not react, a new player appears.

Facebook is my next to be toppled over bet. There is a huge space for innovation and FB is not nimble and quick to react nor it is particularly innovative on its own. Acquisitions and the social network barrier to entry protect FB, but they don't hold forever.

At some point the incumbent becomes so large and diversified that it can't be destroyed by a single competitor. Think IBM. You may come in and beat the incumbent company in the market that originally led to its success, but the incumbent still lives on in many other markets. The only way it is killed is by being consistently less fficient than the average entrant in many markets (i.e. Goliath falls, but there is no David to point to).

Facebook may reach that point before to long, although I'd guess they're not there yet.

IBM was beaten. They failed to evaluate the importance of the micro computer. Further, they failed to see the threat of micro computer-born CPUs to their business. The fact that IBM had enough momentum and clarividence to pivot into consulting is not relevant for this discussion. Today's IBM is not at all the IBM from the seventies.

Sounds kind of like how Kodak died out. It failed to anticipate the speed at which the market would shift into digital imaging and did a crappy job at entering other non-film markets (printers, cameras, etc). It's cash cow rapidly shrank to the point it couldn't fund viable entrants into new markets.

This is a bit circular, saying essentially that the winner is the innovator for winning.

The last mover?

I think the confusion might be the definition of 'new'. Something can be new without being the first of its kind, neither Bill Gate's OS or Larry Page's search engine were the first of their kind, but I think in both cases they were the first of their kind that I used. They were first to the markets that mattered maybe?

Neither were the first of their kind that I (or millions of others) used.

I'd used both CP/M and Apple DOS before MSDOS - neither were exactly niche products back then. And Altavista was pretty well established as the best search engine before the Google upstart appeared.

As for social media, Myspace had 100 million users in 2006 and wasn't passed in popularity by Facebook until a couple of years later.

All of these things were entrants into well established markets which had (at the time) heavyweight incumbents. They've all become vastly more successful than those incumbents, but that's not because they were inventing or even popularising a concept. These weren't obscure concepts that these people took mainstream, and there have been/will be other hugely successful entrepreneurs in every single one of these areas at some point.

I didn't mean "that I used" to sound egotistical, more a proxy for more serious adoption. MySpace was mainstream, but Facebook was a more serious consideration because (at least as I remember it) it didn't allow the quagmire of horrific CSS crud MySpace did. It felt mature and accessible. I remember the 'social media marketing' of Heroes S1, where the kid characters had MySpace accounts and the politician had a Facebook account. Equally millions had used DOS before, but Windows got to people who didn't want to touch the command line. I can't speak to why that isn't also the perception for Apple's GUI OSes.

"More serious adoption" is relative. At the time that DOS, Google and Facebook went mainstream, their competitors would quite definitely have been classed as having serious adoption. And when the things that knock those off their pedestal (some, particularly DOS, were knocked off many years ago), the things that follow them may well have even more serious adoption.

My point is that the author's claim that "You won't get rich, famous and powerful by building a better mousetrap. You can only do that by being the one person who creates or popularises a whole new market segment" is simply wrong and has been shown to be wrong time and time again - including by the very people he's using as examples.

But they all made companies that made things. It has been a long time since any piece of software that was impactful could be built by one person.

And making the company is thus the important part. I would put "the next Linus Torvalds will not build an Operating System" in there too.

Secondly the next new thing has already been invented, it just has not been widely disseminated. James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but he embraced and extended it whilst building perhaps the first truly modern international company.

I think he gave a talk where he actually explains that Zuck built the last social network, Gates, the last OS and so on. The point being that they built the last one that dominated everything else and became king.

here: http://youtu.be/Ni11-BjpWhM?t=4m34s

>And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network.

Unless they are creating Twitter. And an article written before Facebook started would probably have said "The next Tom Anderson won't create a social network"

Yes, every successful business will need to find what their particular unique niche is, and it certainly helps to be the first major player in a whole new area, but the reality is that at this macro level "Every moment in business" doesn't happen "only once". Most markets have plenty of space for multiple innovators making relatively minor tweaks to existing industries.

For instance, you could easily present Steve Jobs being "the next Bill Gates", and he certainly did well out of a company creating OSs (and the hardware to run them on, but at least with Macs, and potentially with iPhones/iPads, the OS was almost certainly the more important part).

I think his point is that the next hugely successful billionaire will not be creating a competitor to something that is already hugely successful today.

That's not to say you can't make a comfortable living building a better mousetrap. It just means you won't be Gates or Zuckerberg.

Of course, you could easily make the argument that Gates (for example) merely built a better mousetrap. It's not like Microsoft invented the operating system. Or the personal computer. Or word processing. Microsoft, through strategy, lots of hard work, and a little luck, happened to be doing just the right thing at just the right time.

Wait, you mean like Elon Musk? The guy is not only competing against hugely successful incumbents, but he's doing it in parallel in two markets! Somewhat ironic given Musk and Thiel are cut from the same cloth.

Thiel's book might be a fun read. Take from it what you want, but it certainly isn't gospel.

Or Bezos in retailing. First he beat Barnes & Noble etc, then he beat Walmart and Target (and everyone else). All from a guy that hadn't spent a minute in retail previously.

Both Bezos and Musk took advantage of an exception to what Thiel is talking about: inflection points in technology sometimes provide massive competitive openings that are better viewed as blue ocean because they're so different from the establishment.

I know that's his point.

I just think that history has proven his point wrong.

None of his examples - Zuckerberg, Gates, Brin or Page got rich out of creating a whole new concept - social media, OSs and search engines existed and were fairly successful things before any of those came along. They all got rich by a combination of building a better mousetrap, smart business moves and luck.

And if someone else comes along and does any of those things (or any other existing business concept) far better than any of these people, or come up with a success enough differentiator in the the same general industry sector - like Jack Dorsey et al did with Twitter for example - they may well become wildly rich as well.

Of course, the more established an industry sector is, the harder and harder it becomes to do something that is differentiating enough to allow you to become wildly rich from it. But there's countless examples across countless industries that show it's far from impossible. People still become hugely rich from innovations in banking, in retail and transport. And none of those are new industries.

See also: http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup (notes from Peter Thiel’s CS183)

I'm wondering if this book is mostly a massaging of those note? It would still be a good read and nice to have but not entirely new.

I think a number of people here may be misinterpreting what Thiel means by "monopoly". Here is the likely backbone of that chapter[0].

I personally believe each company should do one thing, and do that one thing better than anyone else in the world possibly could. Companies should therefore be constantly perfecting that one thing to the degree that no competitor could possibly catch up. I may be wrong, but I hope that's the kind of monopoly Thiel is talking about.

[0] http://blakemasters.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-...

I don't think that's really what that essay is about. Arguably, the point is the opposite of that. Read the part about Thiel interviewing for and not getting a Supreme Court clerkship. That process involves out-competing people: the pool of applicants looking to get into Stanford Law, the pool of classmates looking to get a circuit clerkship, the pool of circuit clerks looking to get a Supreme Court clerkship. Out of the 100,000 people who apply to law schools each year, 36 will get a Supreme Court clerkship 4-5 years later. Being in that 36 just requires doing the same thing everyone else is doing, but doing it better than the other 99,964 people.

The moral of the story is that Thiel became incredibly successful by doing something nobody else was doing. If 100,000 people were all working for 4-5 years trying to create PayPal, maybe Thiel's version wouldn't have been the best. But that doesn't matter, because those people were off applying to law school. That's what Thiel seems to mean by "monopoly." Go find an area where you can make money, where there aren't 100,000 people trying to do the same thing you're doing.

Do you know of many such companies started in the recent decade or two ? that achieved near monopoly state , without unfairly crushing competitors, without depending on network effects(which naturally favor one winner), and without unfairly using regulation ? or without so greatly benefiting from an initial advantage , to the point that even if they stopped seriously competing , no one could harm them ?

Probably not, maybe a few. Why ? because the economy has became a network economy, where almost all industries benefit greatly from network effects. And network effects are unfair by their nature: they give such a huge advantage to the to the leader , even if he doesn't constantly improve.

But why we see so much disruption you ask? well ,disruption also works on monopolies, by making it unprofitable for them to compete. And of course there are always new niches and people's preferences change so that hurt monopolies too.

Peter Thiel's writings are often thought-provoking and insightful. They frequently think several steps deeper than the usual blog posts that we read on the topics... The CS183 notes bear that out.

I've pre-ordered the book. Looking forward to it.

"Progress comes from monopoly, not competition."

Seems rich coming from the guy who founded Paypal, which was widely loathed and seen as pretty stagnant in the payments space after it achieved dominance over that market.

Some of his ideas are elaborated in his public speaking, and the book sounds to be very interesting. I just hope he sticks to the release date and it doesn't get canceled like the previous one.

I can confirm the book will be released on Sept. 16 :)

Like if Microsoft was the first OS.

Like if Google was the first Search Engine.

Like if Facebook was the first Social Network.

...

Exactly...and then those are interesting in _how_ they became the dominant player. Did they offer something the predecessor didn't, etc. Why MS succeeded can be argued around various points re: digital (re: CP/M), the boom of compatibility issues with the 808x machines (back in the DOS days and the proliferation of white box machines (aka IBM compatibles)), and the failure of OS/2 (I'm sure it's more complex than this, but.... Google succeeded as it was (imo) largely faster and more complete than the akebono preliminary as well as the adoption/evolution of the goto.com advertising paradigm. As to how facebook beat out myspace? I haven't heard convincing arguments that are definitive; however, they appear to have placed more of a focus on social aspects than myspace did (and they were less "geocities-like").

I don't think that "there can be only one" Bill Gates for any given category. I don't even think he's saying that there won't be any new OS or Social Network billionaires.

I think he's drawing new types of businesses making new kinds of products for a new market vs businesses "competing in the __ space.

A good litmus test might be the words that were used early on to describe the company/product. Twitter used to be "micro-blogging" or "like SMS but everyone can see it".

MSFT may have had some early users who switched to DOS from Apple II Unix but most learned the words Operating System & DOS in the same instant. Investor's hadn't invested in an operating system company before. etc.

"... competition destroys profits for ... society as a whole."

What is meant by "profits"?

"Progress comes from monopoly..."

What is meant by "progress"?

Does the Antitrust Division at the DOJ do Book Reviews?

I would enjoy reading their review of this one.

I have recently been reading blake masters notes on the class and I find them extremely valuable. They are written so well I feel like I am reading a transcript of the real lecture. It feels like I am getting the source material even though they are a students notes.

I bet the book will be even better since it is revised by Peter himself. I can't wait to read it as well.

> Progress comes from monopoly, not competition.

> ... competition destroys profits for individuals, companies, and society as a whole.

Profits != progress.

This blurb makes it sound like a repackaged Blue Ocean Strategy. Don't try to fight entrenched players in mature markets? This doesn't sound novel at all.

Added to my wishlist. I'll wait for the reviews to come out. I like books, but so many business books have little actionable advice.

Zuck creates a social network when we had so many social networks- but its almost like he's saying going after a 100% blue ocean... ?

Everyone in the comments here are getting caught up in the examples of Gates, Zuck, etc. But the vast majority of people who are even interested in creating something new are creating an app that riffs off an existing concept and are looking for a (quick) exit. I see this book as an evolution of The Blueprint and the Founders Fund manifesto, where Thiel is calling on people to stop squandering creative energy and build something truly great.

Everyone in the comments here are getting caught up in the examples

Maybe that's because the examples appear to contradict the thesis of the book - that's not exactly a ringing endorsement.

I see this book as an evolution of The Blueprint and the Founders Fund manifesto, where Thiel is calling on people to stop squandering creative energy and build something truly great.

Perhaps people are pushed to "quick exits" (and quick bucks) because that's what's emphasized today? Maybe if people didn't have to worry about where their next paycheck was coming from, they'd have more time to "build something truly great."

But no, let's not question the wisdom that monopolies are the only way innovation occurs, ignoring the plenty of counterexamples (Internet Explorer, anyone?).

A perfect example of a site that has indication of further content below the fold.

So, anyone want to reconcile this with his version of libertarianism?

Can you not pre-order Kindle books, or am I missing something?

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