The book ‘ZERO to ONE’ is written by ‘Peter Thiel’. The book was published in 2014. The author of the book, Peter Thiel is the co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund. In this book, Peter Thiel has focused on all the steps an entrepreneur needs to take to build their start-up from ‘Zero to One’. According to Peter Thiel, we should not copy other’s ideas and work on it, because this won’t add to our learnings. But if we start something new of our own we go from 0 to 1 which will help us to add to our learnings.
Peter Thiel has mentioned in his book that every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system and the next Mark Zuckerberg will not create a social network. To achieve something big, hard work is required. Hard work will help us to achieve our future business goals. Two types of progress are mentioned in Peter Thiel’s book ‘Zero to One’. Vertical Progress and Horizontal Progress. Horizontal Progress means copying ideas, doing tasks that have already being done. In horizontal progress, we already knew what will happen and what does it look like. Whereas, vertical progress is difficult to imagine. Vertical progress includes executing new ideas and performing new tasks starting from the zero level. Doing things that are never being done before is included in vertical progress. Vertical progress will help you to learn and grow.
According to Peter Thiel’s book, all the happy companies are different. All the happy companies are successful and happy, they have their uniqueness and they are different from others. Because happy and successful companies follow vertical progress. They start from zero. They execute unique and new ideas. This makes them different from others. According to Peter Thiel competition is an ideology that has deformed our thinking. It is an ideology due to which we get lost in between and get trapped within it. In the book, it is mentioned that competition is not for successful people. Successful companies do not get trapped in competition. Start-ups should always start by focusing on a small market and then proceed to the bigger one. The author Peter Thiel has also mentioned in his book that business is like a chess game, it is always better to be the last mover than to be a first mover. A quote by Grandmaster Jose Raul Capablanca is also mentioned in the book which is- to succeed, “you must study the endgame before anything else.”
Peter Thiel has divided human goals into three goals in his book. Easy goals can be satisfied with minimum efforts, hard goals that require some serious efforts, and impossible goals that can never be achieved, no matter what amount of effort you have put in.
Two types of secrets are mentioned in Peter Thiel’s book. Secret of Nature and secret of People are the two kinds of secrets. Nature’s secret is all over around us in nature. It is easy to find. But People’s secret is difficult to find. People's secret is something that people around you hide from you they don’t want others to know about it, therefore finding people’s secret is difficult.
The book covers all the things an entrepreneur must do to build a successful start-up. All the steps mentioned by Peter Thiel will help to grow a company from zero to one by executing new creative ideas.