Preface
EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.
Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, American companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today. What happens when we’ve gained everything to be had from fine-tuning the old lines of business that we’ve inherited? Unlikely as it sounds, the answer threatens to be far worse than the crisis of 2008. Today’s “best practices” lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.
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. This would be depressing but for one crucial fact: humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work 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 kind 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.
Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything I’ve learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. But while I have noticed many patterns, and I relate them here, this book offers no formula for success. The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.
This book stems from a course about startups that I taught at Stanford in 2012. College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world. My primary goal in teaching the class was to help my students see beyond the tracks laid down by academic specialties to the broader future that is theirs to create. One of those students, Blake Masters, took detailed class notes, which circulated far beyond the campus, and in Zero to One I have worked with him to revise the notes for a wider audience. There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley.
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[试读] 前言
《从0到1》热门书评
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《Zero to One》的一些读书笔记
465有用 2无用 DATou 2014-10-25
2014年10月25日读完第二遍。以下为各章的笔记。 第一章《The Challenge of the Future》:全球化是横向的扩张,只能复制以前就有的成功,而科技创新是纵向的扩张,是创造以前不存在的东西。没有科技创新,只有全球化,这个世界只能玩完。这是为什么要科技创新的原因。 ...
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从0到1看竞争:同时也说说滴滴打车和快的联合
278有用 23无用 小崔 2015-02-14
快滴合并突如其来却又并不出乎意外。恰好最近读过彼得·蒂尔的书《从0到1》(中信出版社),所以写一点小片段,既算评论这个事件,又算书评。彼得·蒂尔,美国支付paypal的创始人,他被称为投资界的思想家,硅谷的天使。他创办的paypal卖了15亿美元,之后搞了创始人基金,投资了linkedin,spac...
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从0到1
132有用 26无用 水之痕迹 2015-03-09
书还没看完,倒是把豆瓣的评论翻了一遍,整理思路如下: 我们常常为了打败对手,将所有精力放在了竞争上,上学时候为了学分,工作时候为了升职,而充分的竞争并不能产生超额的收益,如果你无法迅...
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读书想明白的一些道理
125有用 23无用 张磊 2015-02-23
此书章节短,文笔好,阅读轻松。先来看第一个有意思的点:作者:当我面试应聘者时,都会问一个问题:在什么重要问题上你与其他人有不同看法?为什么要问这个问题呢?从小处看,未来只是还没有到来的时刻,但真正使未来如此独特的,并非未来还没有发生,而是未来的世界会与此刻不同。如果我们的社会在之后100年都没有发生...
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创新是打破?是突破?还是???--关于创业那些事儿
44有用 3无用 纪汐 2015-03-30
----读《从0到1》 文/纪汐托夫勒说过:“多数人在想到未来时,总觉得他们所熟知的世界将永远延续下去;他们难以想象自己去过一种真正不同的生活;更别说接受另一个崭新的文明,我们是旧文明的最后一代,新文明的第一代。《从0到1》该本书问世于2014年9月16日当时是英文版的,由于英文版一面市,就立刻占...