读Peter Thiel, Blake Masters《Zero to One》
2014-11-04
语言霸道，锐气十足。讨论的问题也很广泛，从创业到针对整个社会发展的观点，是一本不能错过的好书。总体来说，其持有的是一种质变抗衡量变的增长思想，通过不断地突破来达到奇点，让科技的指数化创新来击退中国的横轴复制模式。
EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operatingsystem. 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.
That March 2000 financing round bought us the time we needed to make PayPal a success. Just as we closed the deal, the bubble popped.
对于垄断的理解。真正的垄断企业都在拼命扩大自己所处的行业范围，掩饰自己的实际份额。
Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative
characteristics of your business.
As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than
its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic
advantage. Anything less than an order of magnitude better will probably be perceived as a marginal improvement and will be hard to sell, especially in an already crowded
market.
技术、网络、规模、品牌，这几点的归纳非常到位。
Sometimes there are hidden obstacles to scaling—a lesson that eBay has learned in recent years. Like all marketplaces, the auction marketplace lent itself to natural monopoly because buyers go where the sellers are and vice versa. But eBay found that the auction model works best for individually distinctive products like coins and stamps. It works less well for commodity products: people don’t want to bid on pencils or Kleenex, so it’s more convenient just to buy them from Amazon. eBay is still a valuable monopoly; it’s just smaller than people in 2004 expected it to be.
An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse. The indefinite pessimist can’t
know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. All he can do is wait for it to happen, so he might as well eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime: hence Europe’s famous vacation mania.
对于中国的归类：definite pessimism
A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today. When Americans see the Chinese economy grow ferociously fast (10% per year since 2000), we imagine a confident country mastering its future. But that’s because Americans are still optimists, and we project our optimism onto China.From China’s viewpoint, economic growth cannot come fast enough. Every other country is afraid that China is going to take over the world; China is the only country afraid that it won’t.
从经济问题讨论到社会问题，以及政府与企业之间的关系。
The two dominant political thinkers, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, are usually seen as stark opposites: on the egalitarian left, Rawls was concerned with questions of fairness and distribution; on the libertarian right, Nozick focused on maximizing individual freedom. They both believed that people could get along with each other peacefully, so unlike the ancients, they were optimistic. But unlike Spencer or Marx, Rawls and Nozick were indefinite optimists: they didn’t have any specific vision of the future.
The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.
Sometimes looking for natural secrets and looking for human secrets lead to the same
truth. Consider the monopoly secret again: competition and capitalism are opposites. If
you didn’t already know it, you could discover it the natural, empirical way: do a quantitative study of corporate profits and you’ll see they’re eliminated by competition.
But you could also take the human approach and ask: what are people running companies not allowed to say? You would notice that monopolists downplay their monopoly status to avoid scrutiny, while competitive firms strategically exaggerate their uniqueness. The differences between firms only seem small on the surface; in fact, they are enormous.
EVERY GREAT COMPANY is unique, but there are a few things that every business must get right at the beginning. I stress this so often that friends have teasingly nicknamed it “Thiel’s law”: a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
A board of three is ideal. Your board should never exceed five people, unless your
company is publicly held. (Government regulations effectively mandate that public companies have larger boards—the average is nine members.) By far the worst you can do is to make your board extra large. When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit
organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a
huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization. If you want that kind of free rein
from your board, blow it up to giant size. If you want an effective board, keep it small.
As a general rule, everyone you involve with your company should be involved full-time.Sometimes you’ll have to break this rule; it usually makes sense to hire outside lawyers and accountants, for example. However, anyone who doesn’t own stock options or draw a regular salary from your company is fundamentally misaligned. At the margin, they’ll be biased to claim value in the near term, not help you create more in the future. That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.
If a CEO doesn’t set an example by taking the lowest salary in the company, he can do the same thing by drawing the highest salary. So long as that figure is still modest, it sets an effective ceiling on cash compensation.
The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.
Peter Thiel的Palantir公司是一个很重要的大数据分析公司
The logical endpoint to this substitutionist thinking is called “strong AI”: computers that eclipse humans on every important dimension.(当人利用机器增强自身能力越来越多时，其便会不知不觉地与机器相结合)
（不仅仅是中国的原因，美国的能源革命已经直接拉低了全球能源价格，从而迫使过时的清洁能源技术无利可图）
其实最后一部分对于名人的讨论最有意思，配图也不错。
Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and longterm thinking about the future.
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