Zero to One

The Library Essay

Monopoly Is the Goal, Honestly Stated

Peter Thiel's book grew from a Stanford course on startups whose notes, kept by his student Blake Masters, circulated widely enough to demand publication, which came in 2014. Its central distinction is between copying what works, going from one to many, and creating something genuinely new, going from zero to one, and its most provocative counsel follows: competition erodes profits, so the founder's proper ambition is a new monopoly, earned by doing something others cannot.

Thiel co-founded PayPal and wrote the first outside cheque into Facebook, and the book carries the confidence of that record along with contrarian set pieces, the question of what important truth few agree with you on chief among them. It became the most argued-over startup book of its decade, which was presumably the intention.