Zero to One - Peter Thiel
My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be dfined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India’s hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do - using only today’s tools - the result would be environmentally catastrophic. Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to thing for yourself
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.
But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war: allegedlly necessary, supposedly valiant, but ultimately destructive.
By late 1999, we were in all-out war. Many of us at PayPal logged 100-hour workweeks. No doubt that was counterproductive, but the focus wasn’t on objective productivity: the focus was defeating X.com. One of our engineers actually designed a bomb for this purpose; when he presented the schematic at a team meeting, calmer heads prevailed and the proposal was attributed to extreme sleep deprivation.
The most succesful companies make the core progression - to fisrt dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets - a part of their founding narrative.
He divided human goals into three groups:
- Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort
- Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort
- Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes.
This is the classic trochotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problesm have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew.
A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business - no matter how good the product.
Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for serveral but don’t nail one, you’re finished.