Zero to One

북클럽

제목: ZERO TO ONE
저자: Peter Thiel
브라이언 요약: (실리콘밸리 역사책?)

Preface: Zero to One

1. The Challenge of the Future

2. Party Like It's 1999

Silicon valley entrepreneurs learned 4 big lessons
- Make incremental advances (Small incremental steps)
- Stay lean and flexible
- Improve on he competition (Don't create a new market prematurely)
- Focus on product, not sale
Opposite principles are more correct.
- It is better to risk boldness than triviality.
- A bad plan is better than no plan.
- Competitive markets destroy profits
- Sales matters just as much as product.

3. All Happy Companies Are Different

Creating value is not enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.
In 2012, average airfare each way was $178 with airlines made only 37 cents per passenger trip
Google brought $50 billion in 2021 (vs $160 billion for the airlines), but Google kept 21%of those revenues as profits
Perfect competition & monopoly
Monopoly: we mean the kind of company that is good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute. Google is a good example of a company that went from 0 to 1.
Don't build an undifferentiated commodity business.
Google: monopoly on what?
Monopolies drive progress: because monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate.

4. The Ideology of Competition

5. Last Mover Advantage

In 2013, Twitter valued at $24 billion : more than 12 times the Time's market capitalization. (Times earned$133 million in 2012 while Twitter lost money.)
The answer is cash flow. (projected future cash flow)
Will this business still be around a decade from now?
characteristics of monopoly
- Proprietary technology: Google's search algorithms. Amazon's more book selections.
- Network Effects: network effects businesses must start with especially small markets.
- Economies of Scale: copy of the product is close to zero. Service businesses especially are difficult to make monopolies.
- Branding:
Building a monopoly
- Start small and monopolize: start with a very small market. It is easier to dominate a small market than a large one. Red flag: getting 1% of a $100 billion market.
- Scaling Up: dominate a niche market then expand into related and slightly broader markets.
- Don't Disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.

6. You Are Not a Lottery Ticket

7. Follow the Money

Vilfredo Pareto: Pareto principle: 80-20 rule.
The power law.
First. only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. Second. rule number one is so restrictive, there can't be any other rules.
The power law means that differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies.
One market will probably be better than all others.

8. Secrets

A conventional truth: it is not a secret.
Conventions (Easy) - Secrets (Hard) - Mysteries (Impossible)
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
What valuable company is nobody building?
How to find secrets?
- Secrets of nature and secrets about people
- Secrets about people are different. things they don't know about themselves or things they hide.
- What are people running companies not allow to say? Ask
- What to do with secrets?

9. Founders
10. The Mechanics of Mafia

Image from Wikipedia. Back row from left: Jawed Karim, co-founder Youtube; Jeremy Stoppelman CEO Yelp; Andrew McCormack, managing partner Laiola Restaurant; Premal Shah, Pres of Kiva; 2nd row from left: Luke Nosek, managing partner The Founders Fund; Kenny Howery, managing partner The Founders Fund; David Sacks, CEO Geni and Room 9 Entertainment; Peter Thiel, CEO Clarium Capital and Founders Fund; Keith Rabois, VP BIz Dev at Slide and original Youtube Investor; Reid Hoffman, Founder Linkedin; Max Levchin, CEO Slide; Roelof Botha, partner Sequoia Capital; Russel Simmons, CTO and co-founder of Yelp

Employees should love their work. They should enjoy going to the office so much that formal business hours become obsolete and nobody watches the clock.
Hire people who would actually enjoy working together.
Recruiting should never be outsourced.
Talented people don't need to work for you. They have options. Why would some one join your company?
Bad answers
Good answers: 1. Mission 2. Team
Every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing.

11. If You Build It, Will They Come?

3 kinds. 1. thinkers, leaders, and achievers 2. salespeople, consultants 3. workers and artisans.
Customers will not come just because you build it.
In Silicon Valley, nerds are skeptical of advertising, marketing, and sales. but advertising matters because it works.
The best product doesn't always win.
Strong distribution plan. CLV. CAC. (distribution is the hidden bottleneck.)

12. Man and Machine

Computers are tools, not rivals.
Technology is the one way for us to escape competition in a globalizing would.
Machine learning, big data. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst.

13. Seeing Green

7 questions that every business must answer:
- The engineering question
- The timing question
- The monopoly question
- The people question
- The distribution question
- The durability question
- The secret question
Doing something different is what's truly good for society. and its also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market.

14. The Founder's Paradox
Conclusion: Stagnation or singularity?