Decision Making
The Contrarian Question
What important truth do very few people agree with you on? The filter that decides what is worth building.
Read the frameworkCo-founder of PayPal and Palantir, author of Zero to One
Product strategy
Decision Making
What important truth do very few people agree with you on? The filter that decides what is worth building.
Read the frameworkZero to One vs One to N
Going from Zero to One means creating something entirely new -- true vertical progress. Going from One to N means copying or incrementally improving what already exists…
Secrets Framework (Conventions, Secrets, Mysteries)
Knowledge falls into three categories: conventions (widely known, no advantage), secrets (knowable but require effort and intelligence to discover), and mysteries…
Moats
Competition Is for Losers (Monopoly Framework)
Capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is about the accumulation of capital; perfect competition destroys all profits. Every successful business is a…
Zero to One (2014); CS183: Startup - Class 5, Stanford (2012); Wall Street Journal essay (2014)
Last Mover Advantage
Being the first mover is a tactic, not a goal. What matters is being the last mover -- making the last great development in a specific market and enjoying years or…
Co-founders
Thiel's Law (Foundational Decisions)
A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed. Beginnings are qualitatively different from what comes later. The foundational decisions about co-founders, equity…
Zero to One (2014); CS183: Startup - Class 6, Stanford (2012)
Choosing a co-founder is like getting married, and founder conflict is as ugly as divorce.
Co-founder selection at the founding stage. Technical abilities matter, but how well founders know each other and work together matters just as much.
Focus
The Power Law
We do not live in a normal world; we live under a power law. In venture capital, a few companies attain exponentially greater value than all others. The biggest secret…
Zero to One (2014); CS183: Startup - Class 7, Stanford (2012)
If you are spending more time on your struggling investments or projects than on your successful ones, you are engaging in a perverse misallocation of resources. Double down on winners.
Portfolio management, both in VC and in allocating time across business initiatives. The power law means your winners need the most attention.
CS183: Startup - Class 7, Stanford (2012)
Distribution
Distribution Strategy Framework
Distribution is at least as important as product. Most startup failures come from poor sales, not bad products. Sales works best when hidden. Engineers systematically…
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.
When founders are building product without a distribution strategy. Distribution is as important as the product itself.
Positioning
Start with a very small market and monopolize it, then expand into adjacent markets in concentric circles.
Market entry strategy for new startups. A startup should dominate a niche before expanding. Facebook started at Harvard, Amazon started with books, PayPal started with…
If a company describes its market as the intersection of multiple small niches (e.g., 'the only British food restaurant in Palo Alto'), it is probably a non-monopolist exaggerating its uniqueness and operating in a brutally competitive space.
Evaluating how companies describe their market position. Non-monopolists make their market sound small and unique; monopolists make their market sound large and…
Peter Thiel
holds that intelligent design beats Darwinism, and that iterating at random does not get you from zero to one. The answer comes first.
is the counterweight: the fastest way to learn what is true is to ship something ugly and watch what happens.