When you look at founders of successful companies, you’ll find 90% of them are, in a way, weirdos. Where did they find the motivation to stick with it? One word: vision.
Thiel and a 50 person Paypal team spent years getting it to a place where it was the number one payment processor used by ebay customers, so they could finally leverage their monopoly position into selling the company. Lesson 3: If the founders don’t have a vision, a company can never go from zero to one.īut building a monopoly surely doesn’t happen over night. Google loves setting its own prices and reaping 25% of their revenue as profit, so it can make its service even better.Īnd society should love it, because if ever someone came along and did beat Google, it would mean their search engine would probably have to be pretty spankin’ fantastic! Monopolies are nothing to scoff at – they’re actually what any business or startup should shoot for. You love to use Google, because you know it’s the best search engine out there. No! Peter Thiel says that a monopoly simply means one company is doing something so much better than everyone else, that simply no one else can survive. With 75% of the market running on Windows, they’re pretty much a monopoly – but is that really a bad thing? How often have you complained about something not working the way you want it on a Windows computer? Don’t tell me, I’ve been a Microsoft user, I know. These are the kinds of questions you should concern yourself with if you want to play (and win) big. You can only do that by critically questioning a lot of the assumptions you hold about the present.Ĭan people live on the moon? Is a world without cars possible? Will we be able to fully live off renewable energies? If you want to create a startup that’ll not only improve but drastically change the world, you have to go from zero to one, not one to many.
Apple did this too when they came up with the iPhone in 2007 and changed the way we see and use phones altogether. Vertical progress is what it takes to go from zero to one and create the technology or idea in the first place.
This kind of progress spreads existing ideas and technologies from one to many or 1 to n. An example would be Apple making the computer personal – with the Apple II it finally became affordable for the masses to own one. Most of the progress we see on a day-to-day basis is horizontal. If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.ĭownload PDF Lesson 1: The biggest leaps in progress are vertical, not horizontal.Ĭan you imagine what the year 2200 will look like? It’s hard, isn’t it? That’s because you know the world is making tremendous progress every year, but it’s almost impossible to know what that will look like.īut not all progress is created equal.
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