The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. 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. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there.
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The Challenge of the Future
"Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to
ask this question: “What important truth do very few
people agree with you on?”
This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward.
Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult
because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by
definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because
anyone trying to answer must say something she knows
to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in
even shorter supply than genius.
Most commonly, I hear answers like the following:
“Our educational system is broken and urgently needs
to be fixed.”
“America is exceptional.”
“There is no God.”
Those are bad answers. The first and the second statements
might be true, but many people already agree with them.
The third statement simply takes one side in a familiar debate.
A good answer takes the following form: “Most people
believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.” I’ll give my
own answer later in this chapter.
What does this contrarian question have to do with the future?
In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of
all moments yet to come. But what makes the future distinctive
and important isn’t that it hasn’t happened yet, but rather
that it will be a time when the world looks different from
today. In this sense, if nothing about our society changes for
the next 100 years, then the future is over 100 years away. If
things change radically in the next decade, then the future
is nearly at hand. No one can predict the future exactly, but
we know two things: it’s going to be different, and it must
be rooted in today’s world. Most answers to the contrarian
question are different ways of seeing the present; good answers
are as close as we can come to looking into the future.
Zero to One: The Future of Progress
When we think about the future, we hope for a future of
progress. That progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal
or extensive progress means copying things that work—
going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine
because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive
progress means doing new things— going from 0
to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires
doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one
typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress.
If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you
have made vertical progress.
At the macro level, the single word for horizontal progress
is globalization— taking things that work somewhere and
making them work everywhere. China is the paradigmatic
example of globalization; its 20- year plan is to become like
the United States is today. The Chinese have been straightforwardly
copying everything that has worked in the developed
world: 19th- century railroads, 20th- century air
conditioning, and even entire cities. They might skip a few
steps along the way— going straight to wireless without installing
landlines, for instance— but they’re copying all the
same.
The single word for vertical, 0 to 1 progress is technology.
The rapid progress of information technology in recent decades
has made Silicon Valley the capital of “technology” in
general. But there is no reason why technology should be
limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and
better way of doing things is technology.
Because globalization and technology are different modes
of progress, it’s possible to have both, either, or neither at the
same time. For example, 1815 to 1914 was a period of both
rapid technological development and rapid globalization. Between
the First World War and Kissinger’s trip to reopen
relations with China in 1971, there was rapid technological
development but not much globalization. Since 1971, we
have seen rapid globalization along with limited technological
development, mostly confined to IT.
“This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things.”
This age of globalization has made it easy to imagine that
the decades ahead will bring more convergence and more
sameness. Even our everyday language suggests we believe
in a kind of technological end of history: the division of the
world into the so-called developed and developing nations
implies that the “developed” world has already achieved the
achievable, and that poorer nations just need to catch up.
But I don’t think that’s true. My own answer to the contrarian
question is that most people think the future of the
world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that
technology matters more. Without technological change, if
China doubles its energy production over the next two decades,
it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India’s
hundreds of millions of households were to live the way
Americans already do—using only today’s tools—the result
would be environmentally catastrophic. Spreading old ways
to create wealth around the world will result in devastation,
not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without
new technology is unsustainable.
New technology has never been an automatic feature
of history. Our ancestors lived in static, zero-sum societies
where success meant seizing things from others. They created
new sources of wealth only rarely, and in the long run
they could never create enough to save the average person
from an extremely hard life. Then, after 10,000 years of fitful
advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills
and 16th-century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced
relentless technological progress from the advent
of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970.
As a result, we have inherited a richer society than any previous
generation would have been able to imagine.
Any generation excepting our parents’ and grandparents’,
that is: in the late 1960s, they expected this progress to continue.
They looked forward to a four-day workweek, energy
too cheap to meter, and vacations on the moon. But
it didn’t happen. The smartphones that distract us from our
surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings
are strangely old: only computers and communications
have improved dramatically since midcentury. That doesn’t
mean our parents were wrong to imagine a better future—
they were only wrong to expect it as something automatic.
Today our challenge is to both imagine and create the new
technologies that can make the 21st century more peaceful
and prosperous than the 20th.
Startup Thinking
New technology tends to come from new ventures—
startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal
Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous
eight” in business, small groups of people bound together
by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better.
The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop
new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder
to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly,
and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional
organizations, signaling that work is being done
becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually
doing work (if this describes your company, you should
quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create
a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create
an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you
need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you
also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.
Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people
you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new
company’s most important strength is new thinking: even
more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to
think. This book is about the questions you must ask and
answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what
follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise
in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do:
question received ideas and rethink business from scratch."
Extracted from Zero to One by Peter Thiel, out now.
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Extract: Start with Why by Simon Sinek