One of the essential books for startups. The essence of Peter Thiel’s book are the seven questions he raised in the later chapter:
- The Engineering Question
Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?
- The Timing Question
Is now the right time to start your particular business?
- The Monopoly Question
Are you starting with a big share of a small market?
- The People Question
Do you have the right team?
- The Distribution Question
Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?
- The Durability Question
Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?
- The Secret Question
Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?
Some other quotes that I find inspiring and support the above seven questions (principles):
- Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
- The most successful companies make the core progression — to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets — a part of their founding narrative.
- As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible
- You must study the endgame before everything else.
- A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.
- A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.
- For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. (Matthew 25:29)
- Every single company in a good venture portfolio must have the potential to succeed at vast scale.
- A company does better the less it pays the CEO — that’s one of the single clearest patterns I bet noticed from investing in hundreds of startups.
- The founding moment of a company, however, really does happen just once: only at the very start do you have the opportunity to set the rules that will align people toward the creation of value in the future.
- The most valuable kind of company maintains an openness to invention that is most characteristic of beginnings. This leads to a second, less obvious understanding of the founding: it lasts as long as a company is creating new things, and it ends when creation stops. If you get the founding moment right, you can do more than create a valuable company: you can steer its distant future towards the creation of new things instead of the stewardship of inherited success. You might even extend its founding indefinitely.
- You should ask yourself a more printed version of the question: why would someone join your company as its 20th engineer when she could go work at Google for more money and more prestige?
- You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done. The opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside great people.
- From the outside, everyone in your company should be different in the same way. On the inside, every individual should be sharply distinguished by her work.
- The most valuable business of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.
Jot them down here to revisit from time to time.
Worth the read!
