Peter Thiel's Zero to One Might Be the Best Business Book I've Read

I've mentioned this before on other threads, but it is worth repeating here. Thiel is basically making the same claims (but with less evidence and I think less rationality) that Tyler Cowen (an economist) has been making for several years. Cowen's views are more nuanced (and in my opinion more reasonable) than Thiel's. Cowen's book "Average Is Over" is an excellent distillation of his thesis.

The Hard Thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz seemed to me to be a more focused book, especially if you are reading it to find more about business and startups, Thiel's book is very good, but he tends to deviate from the main subject too much for me.

It seems no one mentioned the purpose of this book in the first place and I believe it's one of the important dimensions. Here is part of my review on Amazon: When I started to read the book, I only paid attention to the facts and thoughts the author provides. After a while, I found it is a book that gives readers more questions to pull them from the world they are familiar with so that they may be able to begin to discover a different world. That's the real purpose of this book. The author did a great job on this. I guess he put a lot of thoughts to prepare for the book. And this is what the original materials is for in the first place, lectures for students.

I've read all of the Stanford 183 notes that Blake Masters took, but not the book that just came out. Have any of you read both? Did you think the book was worth it if you already have the notes?

To add one more point to the discussion... after reading <i>Zero to One</i>, I found that I had a renewed interest it thinking about &quot;big idea stuff&quot; &#x2F; futurology, etc. I had a realization that I&#x27;ve been pretty negligent about reading up on stuff which purports to talk about &quot;the future to come&quot; and ideas about the kinds of things that Thiel&#x27;s &quot;definite optimists&quot; might want to work on.<p>Now futurology is clearly not without it&#x27;s own issues, and we all know that it is damn hard to make predictions (well, accurate ones anyway) about the future. But I think if nothing else I&#x27;ve been reminded that it&#x27;s a good idea to at least make some effort to keep up with what the &quot;futurist&quot; crowd are talking about, and also to pull my head up from time to time and look around in domains other than my particular current niche. Materials science? Yay! Energy? Yay! Artificial biology? Yay!<p>Of course it may be the case that nothing comes from any of this, but it strikes me that it&#x27;s probably important for an entrepreneur (or would be entrepreneur) to make some effort to stay abreast of this stuff. So I finally finished <i>The Singularity is Near</i> and started looking for good futurist blogs to subscribe to. I feel like I should probably also start reading those &quot;general purpose&quot; science magazines (Sci Am, Discover, Popular Science, New Scientist, etc.) again as well.<p>What do you guys think? Do you make it a point to keep up with forward looking &quot;stuff&quot; outside of your own domain, or read any &quot;futurist&quot; writing?

I agree. He articulates things I&#x27;ve been unable to.<p>In particular, that encouraging specialization in our adolescents, at the expense of &quot;well roundedness,&quot; can be a good thing for some of them.

As a college student myself, I think this book should be a required reading for every first year student considering starting something during their college years.

&gt;His most provocative thesis, excerpted in a popular WSJ column, declares that &quot;competition is for losers&quot; and entrepreneurs should embrace monopolies.<p>I saw him talk a couple of days ago and he said the &quot;competition is for losers&quot; phrase was not what he wrote but the WSJ rewrote the title. His intent (I forget the exact wording) was to avoid competition by doing something sufficiently innovative that there is no close competition, and he cited Google search and the iPhone.<p>The original title was a variation of Tolstoy&#x27;s &quot;Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way&quot; along the lines of companies that are alike are unhappy and happy companies do things their own way.

&gt; &quot;The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined,&quot; he writes. This power law distribution of VC investments means that a few bets will get fabulously unequal returns and it&#x27;s almost impossible to predict which ones those will be.<p>Well it&#x27;s &quot;almost impossible&quot; as long as they believe so and don&#x27;t learn how to do it. C.f.,<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8359765" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8359765</a>

Thiel will be on On Point today. Excerpt of his book there.<p><a href="http://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/09/29/peter-thiel-technology-politics-libertarians" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;onpoint.wbur.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;29&#x2F;peter-thiel-technology-po...</a>

<i>After two tours of duty at Stanford (which did little to dissuade him of the notion that college is a waste of time) he founded PayPal</i><p>So, um, why did he do the 2nd one then?<p>Seems a little hypocritical...

Should we not better read the books that this people read, to get rich and famous ?<p>Which books did they read ?

It&#x27;s available as a sane [drm-free] epub book to buy anywhere?

Does anyone else have an opinion on this book, I dismissed it at first but this has me reconsidering.

I think it&#x27;s awful. I only finished it because we&#x27;re discussing it in a book circle.

I agree. In my mind only Clayton C. Christensen and Peter F. Drukert have been able to write about business without saying the obvious and actually delivering a philosophy rather than obvious observations.

Along with several things that Peter Thiel has said recently that made me think &quot;well, that surely decreases his authority in my mind&quot; when he recently professed his love and addiction to the Drudge Report I could not help thinking that he really lacks any credibility. Someone who is addicted to drudge mental trash and right wing rage-baiting really kind of shows a deep lack of significant mental capacities.

Been hearing a lot about Zero to One. Time for my kindle to wake up and get me Zero to one.

It&#x27;s great but all that content was available for years right? Are people just now finding out about the Stanford 101 Blake Masters notes?