Make no mistake: This book is about Peter Thiel even though Blake Masters (apparently a former student) is a co-author. “Zero to One” is a highly-rated book on entrepreneurship. It is on most lists and I was recommended it by a mentor after I started Kiko and horribly failed.
Unfortunately 60% of the book is utter nonsense. Thiel tries to paint a picture of the hydra-headed world in extremely broad and thereby meaningless strokes. His views either completely lack rigor or are irrelevant to the subject at hand — or both. For instance, I was perplexed why a book on entrepreneurship was trying to diagnose the European habit of napping. The other 40% however, contains valuable business insights. For one, businesses should actually try to be “monopolies” — monopolize a hitherto untapped market in order to truly grow large. For another, “distribution,” or sales, really does matter even though engineers give it a bad rep. If you can’t get your product in front of the kind of people who’d use it, how are you going to be successful? A third tremendously instructional point was that the single biggest differentiator of any startup must be a product that’s at least 10x better than the nearest competitor’s. The edge might come from vastly improved technology, user experience, design — but it needs to be at least 10x better to stick.
That the book is such a success in spite of the nonsense demonstrates just how important the minority of his insight really is (and probably also how big of a brand Thiel has).