Zero to One

Overview

As an overall, I'd rate this book as a Skip. I saw the author and the tagline and grabbed it. It's a short book that essentially feels like Peter just rambling through some thoughts on random topics for a few hours.

In general, Peter Thiel is a pretty amazing person to hear ramble for a couple hours. But I didn't find most of it super useful. The pitch for the book is essentially ramblings on startups which I guess fits to the book.

I feel like if you want to read through a book of a super successful person waxing philosophical on useful topics, I'd recommend Build by Tony Fadell. That one was amazing and was structured in a way of him talking to people at his level as he progressed through his career.

7 Questions

• The Engineering Question
• The Timing Question
• The Monopoly Question
• The People Question
• The Distribution Question
• The Durability Question
• The Secret Question

One thing I found useful in this book was a discussion about the "7 Questions" that all new start-ups (especially tech startups) need to consider.

There are details in the book about what each of these questions are and why we might need to answer them. I like it as a framework for considering a new idea for a business. As with other books on the list, I wonder if this was a core idea and they decided to scale up a book around it. I've found a number of books that feel like a solid long blog post which have been built up into a book somewhat unnecessarily. His concept of "Building the Future" feels a bit overblown for the content of the book.

Wrap-Up

I wouldn’t call this a bad book, but it’s not one I’m likely to recommend or rate highly on my book shelf.

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