Peter Thiel: Going from Zero to One

In teaching entrepreneurship or writing about entrepreneurship, there's a big challenge in it because I think there is no single formula, as you can tell from the last few speakers. It's always a very, very different story. And I think every moment in the history of business, every moment in the history of technology happens only once. The next Mark Zuckerberg will not be building a social networking site. The next Larry Page will not be building a search engine. The next Bill Gates will not be building an operating system company. If you're copying these people, in some sense, you're not learning from them. And this is why I think there is no science to business. Science starts with the number two. It starts with things that are repeatable and experimentally verifiable in one way or another. whereas I think every great company is one of a kind. And the question is, how do you get from zero to one? And so the starting point for my book, Zero to One, is this sort of anti-formulaic approach. It's to take this question of singularity and uniqueness as the central question. And I try to get at it through a variety of sort of contrarian questions. What great business is nobody building? Tell me something that's true that nobody agrees with you on. These are often quite hard questions to answer because we think it's hard to come up with some new truth or it often requires courage because you often have to go against conventional wisdom in one way or another. I want to maybe share two or three of these contrarian truths that I believe that people generally don't understand. My book Zero to One is a whole set of these things, things that I believe to be true that most people do not agree with me on. First big truth that comes right out of this idea of unique businesses. I think that if you're a founder or entrepreneur, what you want to aim for is monopoly. You want to aim to build a company that is one of a kind and that is so far differentiated from the competition that it's not even competing. And I think this is the conventional wisdom is always that capitalism and competition are somehow synonyms. I believe they're antonyms. A capitalist is someone who's in the business of accumulating capital. A world of perfect competition is a world where all the profits are competed away. If you want to compete like crazy, then you should just open a restaurant in Chicago. And I think the great companies like Google, sort of the paradigm example I use, has had no serious competition in search since 2002 when it definitively distanced itself from Yahoo and Microsoft. And as a result, it's been generating enormous cash flows for the last 12 years. I sort of get at this, you know, I think there are sort of two different reasons this monopoly and competition idea is not understood. One is somewhat intellectual because the people who have monopolies don't talk about it. They pretend not to have monopolies for reasons that I will leave to your imagination. And the people who don't have monopolies pretend to have something unique about their business because otherwise nobody would invest or give them any money. And the way you do this is if you have a monopoly like Google, you will pretend that you are in a much, much larger so you will never, as Google, talk about the search business and say we have a 66% share of the search market and we're much more dominant than Microsoft ever was with the operating system market in the 1990s. You will instead say that we are a technology company and technology is this vast space where we're competing with Apple on iPhones and we're competing with Facebook on social and we're going to build self-driving cars and we're competing with all the car companies in Detroit and there's just competition everywhere. and so it sort of gets obscured by making the market appear to be bigger than it really is. And then conversely, if you were to listen to my talk today and run out of here and decide you had to start a restaurant immediately, and you would talk to various investors and they'd say, well, I don't want to invest in a restaurant because I know they all go out of business and I will lose all my money, you will tell them some idiosyncratic story where this is a one-oF-A-Kind restaurant. It's completely unique and very different from all the others. It is the only British Nepalese fusion cuisine within downtown Chicago. And so there's sort of this fictional story that gets told the other way. And so I think that because of these distortions that people tell about their businesses, I think this monopoly question ends up being very, very underappreciated and we sort of underweighted as a variable intellectually. But I think there's also sort of a second reason that this is not understood that well. You know, I sort of, the opening line of Anna Karenina is that all happy families are alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way. And I think the opposite is true of business. I think all happy companies are different because they came up, they figured out some way to radically differentiate themselves and escape from competition, all unhappy companies are alike because they fail to escape the essential sameness that is competition. The chapter in my book entitled, All Happy Companies Are Different, got excerpted by the Wall Street Journal, and they retitled it a little bit more provocatively with the title, Competition Is for Losers. And the reason this is such a provocative title is because we always think that the losers are the people who can't compete effectively enough. The losers are the people who are slow on the swim team in high school. The losers are the people whose grades or test scores aren't quite good enough to get into the right universities or something like that. And so the idea that somehow competition itself is something that we are perversely attracted to is very counterintuitive. And yet I want to suggest that there is always this incredible pull that competition has on us. The sort of the autobiographical anecdote in my book, when I was a teenager in my 20s, and the advice I'd give my younger self, was incredibly driven by these sort of competitive dynamics. My eighth grade junior high school yearbook, one of my friends said, I know you're gonna make it into Stanford in four years, and I, sure enough, I got into Stanford four years later. then went to Stanford Law School, and then ended up at a big law firm on Wall Street. It was one of those places where from the outside, everybody was trying to get in. On the inside, everybody was trying to get out. When I left after seven months and three days, one of the people down the hall from me told me it was reassuring to see me leave. He had no idea it was possible to escape from Alcatraz. And of course, all you had to do was go out the front door. But it was psychologically hard for people to do this because their identity was so wrapped up in the competitions they had won, the people they had beaten along the way, that they could not even imagine doing anything different. And so I think this is, and this is why I think competition is always this very two-edged thing. When you compete ferociously, you will get better at that which you are competing on, but you will always narrow your focus. to beating the people around you. And it often comes at this very high price of losing sight of what is more important or perhaps more valuable. And so I think there's this very strange phenomenon in Silicon Valley where a lot of the most talented startups, a lot of the great startups, seem to be run by people who are suffering from a mild form of Asperger's. And I think we need to always turn this fact around and view this as an indictment of our whole society. Because what does it say about our society when anyone who does not suffer from Asperger's, who is socially well-adapted, will be talked out of all of their original creative ideas before they are even fully formed, who will sense this is a little bit too weird, that's a little bit strange, that sounds a little bit crazy, people are looking at me in a weird way. and I think this is something that we must all realize is sort of a deeply endemic problem. They've done these studies at Harvard Business School, which I think you can often think of the business school student as a profile in anti-Asperger's. They're sort of very extroverted, often have no real convictions, and you have sort of a hothouse environment in which you put all these people for two years, and at the end of the two-year process, they've all sort of talked to each other and they've concluded they should all try to catch the last wave. And it's invariably a pretty bad idea. In 1989, they all wanted to work for Michael Milken, just a year or two before he went to jail. You know, they were never interested in tech or Silicon Valley except for'99, 2000, when they timed the dot-com bubble implosion perfectly. And then sort of 2005 to'07, it was all housing and private equity and things like that. And it's easy in some ways to make fun of people in business school or people who are sort of conventionally tracked, but I think we should recognize that we're all very prone to this. Already in the time of Shakespeare, the word ape meant both primate and to imitate. And there is something very deep in human nature that is imitative. It has a lot of good things. It's how language gets learned by kids. It's how culture gets transmitted in our society. but it also can lead to sort of a lot of insane behavior. It can lead to the madness of crowds, to bubbles, to sort of mass delusions of one sort or another. And I think it can, and I think it's, you know, advertising. We always think of, we always tell ourselves that we're not that prone to this, and I think that's something I'd encourage all of us to rethink. You know, we always think of advertising as something that just afflicts other people, that never afflicts ourselves. I think this is very far from the case. And so the monopoly competition is not just this intellectual failure, it's also this thing where you have a tiny door where everyone's trying to rush through, and there may be around the corner a vast and secret gate that no one's taking, and you should always find the secret path and go ahead and take that. Two other quick thoughts on two other quick ideas on things that I believe to be true that most people don't agree with me on. I think there are many answers to this question, what is true that people don't agree with me on? And most of us actually don't think there are that many answers left. We think that all these answers have been discovered. And I sort of give a trichotomy in my book of conventions, which are truths everybody already knows. The other end, there are mysteries, which are truths that we can't, that nobody in this world can figure out. and then there are things that are in between that are hard. It takes a lot of work, but if you apply yourself, you could figure those out. And I call those secrets. And I think there are many secrets left. Now, there are certain areas where it's not that promising to look. So, you know, if you were growing up in the 17th or 18th century, there were some empty spaces on the map, and you could become an explorer and discover some more secrets about geography. Or in the 19th century, there were still some empty spaces left on the periodic table of elements, and you could go into chemistry and discover some things in basic chemistry. And so I think geography, basic chemistry, these are areas that have been fully explored. These are areas where you're not going to find any secrets. These are not promising areas where you will discover a new truth that no one else knows and that can become the basis for a great insight or a great business. But I think most areas are not like this. and I think that there are many directions we can go in where the frontier is still surprisingly close. There certainly has been an enormous amount of ideas and businesses that have been discovered in this IT space for the last 40 years, and there's no reason to think that's going to stop around computers, internet, mobile internet, software. There are many things people find The ideas are often, they always seem shockingly simple in retrospect. They're pretty hard ex-ante. You know, when we came up at PayPal with combining email with money, you know, that was a secret. It was not an easy thing to figure out. No one else in the world had figured it out. But it was, you know, far from impossible to do. And once we came up with the idea, we thought, wow, it's amazing no one's thought of this yet. We have to really execute too fast before anyone catches up. And so I think there are many things, there are many secrets like this that are left to be discovered, and we see this with all the new businesses that emerge in these areas. I actually think that we should try to find some in a number of other areas. So I think that everything from biotech to space technologies, all sorts of other areas of technology, I think have been somewhat underexplored in recent decades, and that it would be good if the cone of progress were not just this narrow cone around computers and the world of bits, but were expanded to include the world of atoms in many other ways. So second idea is there are many, many secrets left for us to discover. Third idea that I'll end on, and this is the basic dichotomy in my book. I think for us to have a successful 21st century, we're going to have to have both globalization and technological innovation. And I think these are two very different modes of progress. And people often use these words interchangeably, and I think that's always a big mistake. I draw globalization always on an x-axis. I describe it as copying things that work, going from one to n, horizontal, or extensive growth. China is the paradigm of globalization today. And to first approximation, what China needs to do in the next 20 years is just copy everything that's working in the West. You can maybe skip a few steps, but if it executes against that, the people in China will be much better off in the decades ahead. And then I always draw technology on the y-axis. I describe it as vertical or intensive growth, doing new things going from zero to one. And we can sort of see this big difference between globalization and technology. If we think about the history of the last 200 years, there have been periods of globalization, there have been periods of technology. The 19th century was a period of both. From 1815 to 1914, you had tremendous technological progress and tremendous amounts of globalization taking place. After 1914, with the World Wars, communism, all sorts of other events, globalization sort of went in reverse. The world became a much more disunited, much more fragmented sort of a place. But technology continued to go at a ferocious pace. And I would argue since maybe about 1971 when Kissinger went to China and globalization restarted, began at a ferocious rate the last 40 plus years. Technology has been going a little bit more slowly where it's been, as I already said, a narrow focus on computers and a little bit less of other things. The last century, unlike the 19th century, has been a period where we first had lots of technology but no globalization, and we've now had a more recent period where we've had lots of globalization but only limited technological progress. And this change is reflected in a very different way in which we talk about today's world. In the 1950s or 1960s, we would have described the world as being divided between the first world and the third world. The first world was that part of the world that saw relentless, accelerating technological progress. The third world was that part of the world that was permanently stuck, permanently screwed up in one way or another. So no globalization, but lots of technology. Today we would divide the world into the developed and developing nations. The developing nations are those that are copying the developed world. And so this developing dichotomy is a pro-globalization dichotomy. It's sort of a convergence theory of history where the entire world will become and more homogenous as globalization continues apace. But it is also implicitly an anti-technological dichotomy, because when we say that we're living in the developed world, we are implicitly saying that we're living in that part of the world where nothing new is going to be done, where things are finished, they're complete, and we can expect decades of stagnation and sclerosis, and the younger generation should expect to have a lower living standard than their parents, and we have sort of this rather bleak view of the future. And I think we should not accept that sort of a label. We should not accept this idea that we're living in the developed world. And so I will end by saying that I think we should always return to the very contrarian question, how can we go about developing the developed world? Thank you very much.