Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Crown Business 2014

Excerpt: “In a world of gigantic administrative bureaucracies both public and private, searching for a new path might seem like hoping for a miracle. Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands, of miracles. We call these miracles technology.

“Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do more with less, ratcheting up our fundamental capabilities to a higher level. Other animals are instinctively driven to build things like dams or honeycombs, but we are the only ones that can invent new things and better ways of making them. Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world. These are the kinds of elementary truths we teach to second graders, but they are easy to forget in a world where so much of what we do is repeat what has been done before.”

Praise: “This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.” —Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook

“Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.” —Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla

“When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan

“Zero to One is the first book any working or aspiring entrepreneur must read—period.” —Marc Andreessen, co-creator of the world’s first Web browser, co-founder of Netscape, and venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz