 So, a second business book that I read in 2015 was Zero to One by Peter Thiel. This was a fairly influential book from what I understand around all the VCs, the startup entrepreneurs, and all the other people chasing big dreams in Silicon Valley. Because it was a good book, and because of who Peter Thiel is, he is a genius by all accounts, very successful in everything he'd ever done. He's a chess, I think, international master. He was one of the top law students, almost made it to the Supreme Court for some prestigious sort of internship type thing, which he discusses in the book. And perhaps most relevantly, he founded PayPal in the early days of internet startups. PayPal became a billion dollar company, and significantly he also chose most of the people who joined PayPal and later became known as the PayPal Mafia. After working at PayPal, they went on to become some of the greatest VCs and CEOs in Silicon Valley, including Reid Hoffman, founder-CEO of LinkedIn. And these weren't just people who were already at the top and got together, these were people that Peter brought in and interviewed and recognized their talent. So the book Zero to One, well let's talk about the title, Zero to One. The title speaks to his idea which is creating something new instead of iterating on what exists. So you don't take existing products and make them a little bit better, you take, you imagine new products and new things that people need, and you create those. You go from nothing to something. Peter demonstrates a lot of really rich and fascinating perspectives. He talks about pessimistic societies versus optimistic ones. He uses China as an example of a pessimistic society, taking the position that their mentality is defined by their very recent poverty and famine still within living memory. So they are mostly, they're not innovating, I think that's something that most people agree on, they're not innovating very much because Peter claims they're all bracing for those hard times or just imagining them. America, by contrast, he imagines as an optimistic society, but he makes a second distinction, definite versus indefinite. And this is very interesting, the indefinite society doesn't know how the future is going to be great, but they know it's going to be great. And he talks about the dangers of doing it this way without a plan. And he'll illustrate this distinction between definite and indefinite in many different dimensions including philosophy. He'll cite Marx as a philosopher that had a definite picture of the future, very specific concrete actionable plans versus, I believe he cited Noziak and Rawls as philosophers who had an indefinite view of the future and therefore, well I think there's a host of reasons why they're less popular, they don't appeal to the lower classes for one, but part of their lack of attraction may be their sort of indefinite vision of the future. And of course he talks about how dangerous it is in business to have this wishy-washy danger of view of the future without concrete plans. Fascinating perspective, I love that he tells the story of how him and Elon Musk got together because they were competing with each other. When Peter Thiel was trying to make PayPal, Elon Musk was trying to make something called X. Actually, I think what Peter Thiel was working on was not yet called PayPal, but they were both doing payment processing services and they got together in Palo Alto on University Avenue and decided to become one company. This was interesting to me because I had gone to Stanford and I knew University Avenue and I could imagine the cafe where they met, he said it was a cafe exactly between their two offices. And what's interesting is that I think I was there at the time, I finished Stanford in 2000, 2000 or 2001, I don't even remember. So I think I was actually there while this was happening which is kind of exciting. But let's get to the biggest idea in his book and that is his reinvention of the term monopoly. He recasts monopoly as a good thing. He says when companies are iterating against each other like him and Elon Musk were poised to do in the early days of payment processing or like automakers are doing or like airlines are doing, when there's this cutthroat competition, it's really hard to make money, first of all. And it's really hard to do other things that might be good for the world. So in specific contrast to those non-monopolies which have to compete, Peter Thiel describes Google and Facebook and other sort of dominant internet companies that have 60% or higher market share whose position is not challengeable in the near term. And he describes those as monopolies and say they bring all kinds of good things to the world, for example Google sells advertising essentially but they're doing, they have this free translation service, they're working on a driving car, free map service, free search obviously and Peter says see when companies are in this unchallengeable position they bring all these good things to the world. You can imagine how this is a bit of a self-serving philosophy, he is in such a position but at the same time I think it's a valuable perspective. His use of the word monopoly is good too because obviously you can more precisely describe this using more words instead of calling this a monopoly you can say companies with a 60% market share or you can say dominant companies or something like that. He chose to use the word monopoly which I think serves several purposes, one it's more interesting it kind of gets your idea because by recasting the term monopoly and sort of presenting it in an unexpected way he, well it's startling it gets your attention and it really it really puts the issue on a pedestal, secondly it may make the idea seem a little bit more unique than it is, if I understand correctly this idea of creating new markets was was named the blue ocean strategy or blue ocean philosophy or blue water philosophy something like that it came out of Harvard Business School in the not too distant past so I think it predates Peter's book and the idea was already out there but you know he's Peter Thiel if he wants to call it use the word monopoly and reinvent that word you know he can do that and that that may also be a good thing because it does call attention to it and and it does challenge us because it's because it creates a contradiction because we think of monopolies as bad things generally in terms of investments he he he makes clear that what he looks for is the really really big winners so he wants the extremely successful company the company that's going to invent invent the new market his founders fund invested in RBNB did I say that right Airbnb Airbnb that company that's doing sort of peer-to-peer room rentals and is very successful and he'll point out that if he invests in 10 companies in a year the the most successful company will be will almost always be bigger than the next nine combined so so that's an interesting perspective too especially as the startup that I'm involved with we're gonna we're like going to look for the the big money is is on our horizon after we enter the market and prove our concept with a few beta testers so so that's that Peter Thiel's zero to one next I'm gonna review his other book the diversity myth thanks for listening