ZERO TO ONE

60-SECOND BOOK BRIEFS

BY PETER THIEL

Peter Thiel tells us in Zero To One that the next Bill Gates will not build an operating system, and the next Mark Zuckerberg will not build a social network.

Instead, they will ask themselves the following question…

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

This is not an easy question to answer, but you can start heading down that path by

following these few

steps.

1

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35

52.5

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2005 2006 2007 2008

Find out what everybody agrees on. For instance, in a pre-2008 world, everybody would have agreed that real estate always appreciates in value.

2

assumptionsDig deeper to figure out if it’s true or not. You might find that the assumptions of an entire industry are based on things that they wish were true, like the financial industry before the crash in 2008.

3Based on this contrarian truth, what valuable company is nobody building?

10xAs Thiel points out, this can’t be a slight improvement on a company that already exists, it needs to be something different - at least 10 times better than the closest substitute.

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