Zero to One book review

This is #1 article under Reading and Sharing. I love to read so much and I have decided to share what I read, to the world. I am supper excited to start. Let’s begin…

I have read Zero to One by Blake Masters and Peter Thiel. Here are some important notes for the entrepreneurs:

• He advised to invent new things, something started from zero to one.
• Stay out of competition, be unique to your field, competition will bring you down. Don’t highlight how you are unique, this will bring competition.
• Once you are 10x better, you escape competition.
• Serve a small group of people without any competition and then launch for an open web.
• Necessity is great obstacle to a great deal
• Stay small team to effectively collaborate with each other
• If you want to create and capture lasting value then don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.
• Monopoly, to some extent, is a prime condition for every successful business.
• Creative Monopoly means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator.
• Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation and a struggle for survival.
• For a company to be valuable, it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short term goals rather then focusing long term valuable goals.
• Every monopoly is unique but they share some combination of the following characteristics: propriety technology, network effects, economies of scale and branding.
• Generally initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all.
• The perfect target market for the startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competition.
• Once you take over small niche market then plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disturb: avoid competition as much as possible.
• Iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1.
• The voice of doubt: if it were possible to discover something new, wouldn’t someone from the faceless global talent pool of smarter and more creative people have found it already? This can dissuade people from even starting to look for new.
• What happens when company stops believing in secrets? The sad decline of Hewlett-Packard provides a cautionary tale.
• We can even learn to escape it entirely and settle new frontiers. But we will never learn any of these secrets unless we demand to know then and force ourselves to look.
• “Thiel’s Law”: a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
• As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on the flawed foundation.
• you need good people who get along, but you also need a structure to help keep everyone aligned for the long term.
• If you want an effective board for your company then keep it small.
• A company does better the less it pays the CEO.
• If you have 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.
• If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you are finished.
• The customer won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way.

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