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Zero to One
A unique founder can make authoritative decisions,
inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for
decades.
…Web 2.0 startups successfully launched amid the
debris of the dot-coms…
…a valuable business must start by finding a niche
and dominating a small market (like
Facebook)…the challenge for the entrepreneurs who
will create Energy 2.0 is to think small.
Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for
success that other people don’t see.
Are you starting with a big share of a small market?
“Software is eating the world,” venture capitalist Marc
Andreessen has announced with a tone of
inevitability.
The most valuable businesses of coming decades will
be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower
people rather than try to make them obsolete.
Like acting, sales works best when hidden…none of
us wants to be reminded when we’re being sold.
Whatever the career, sales ability distinguishes
superstars from also-rans.
If anything, people overestimate the relative difficulty
of science and engineering, because the
challenges of those fields are obvious. What nerds
miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look
easy.
All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion,
not sincerity.
Tom Sawyer managed to persuade his
neighbourhood friends to whitewash the fence for him
–a
masterful move. But convincing them to actually pay
him for the privilege of doing his chores was
the move of a grandmaster, and his friends were
none the wiser. Not much has changed since Twain
wrote in 1876.
For the company to work, it didn’t matter what people
looked like or which country they came from, but
we needed every new hire to be equally obsessed.
The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to
make every person in the company responsible for
doing just one thing. I started doing this just to
simplify the task of managing people. But then I
noticed
a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflicts.
Most fights inside a company happen when
colleagues compete for the same responsibilities.
Startups face an especially high risk of this since job
roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating
competition makes it easier for everyone to build the
kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere
professionalism.
The first team that I built has become known in Silicon
Valley as the PayPal Mafia because so many of
my former colleagues have gone on to help each
other start and invest in successful tech companies.
We sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Since
then, Elon Musk has founded SpaceX and co
founded Tesla Motors; Reid Hoffman co-founded
LinkedIn; Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jaw Karim
together founded YouTube; Jeremy Stoppelman and
Russel Simmons founded Yelp, David Shacks co
founded Yammer and I co-founded Palantir. Today all
seven of those companies are worth more than
$1 billion each….the team has done extraordinary
well, both together and individually….
If you can’t count durable relationships among the
fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your
time well – even in purely financial terms…stronger
relationships would make us not just happier and
better at work but also more successful in our
careers beyond PayPal. So we set out to hire people
who would actually enjoy working together. They had
to be talented, but even more than that they had
to be excited about working specifically with us. That
was the start of the PayPal Mafia.
If you want an effective board, keep it small.
As a general rule, everyone you involve with your
company should be involved full-time….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. 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 to bring someone on
board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right:
you’re either on the bus or off the bus.
When you start something, the first and most crucial
question you make is whom to start with….
Founders should share a prehistory before they start
a company together – otherwise they’re just rolling
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dice.
It’s very hard to go from 0 to 1 without a team.
What to do with secrets.
The few who knew what might be learned,
Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show,
And reveal their feelings to the crowd below,
Mankind has always crucified and burned.
Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s
rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that
you know.
Great companies can be built on open but
unsuspected secrets about how the world works.
Consider
the Silicon Valley startups that have harnessed the
spare capacity that is all around us but often
ignored….Airbnb saw untapped supply and
unaddressed demand where others saw nothing at
all…. Only by believing in and looking for secrets
could you see beyond the convention to an
opportunity hidden in plain sight.
When thinking about what kind of company to build,
there are two distinct questions to ask: What
secrets is nature not telling you? What secrets are
people not telling you?
He needed brilliance to succeed, but he also needed
a faith in secrets. If you think something hard is
impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve
it…. There are many more secrets left to find, but
they will yield only to relentless searches.
If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life,
you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being
lonely but right – dedicating your life to something that
no one else believes in – is really hard. The
prospect of being lonely and wrong can be
unbearable.
The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business.
Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year
plans to create new products and distribute them
effectively. … Jobs saw that you can change the
world
through careful planning, not by listening to focus
group feedback or copying others’ successes.
Optimists welcome the future, pessimists fear it. (63)
If success were mostly a matter of luck, these kinds of
serial entrepreneurs probably wouldn’t exist. In
January 2013, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and
Square, tweeted to his 2 million followers: “Success
is never accidental.”
….”Shallow men believe in luck, believe in
circumstances…. Strong men believe in cause and
effects.”
(60)
PayPal could be seen disruptive as well, but we didn’t
try to directly challenge any large competitor. It’s
true that we took some business away from Visa
when we popularised internet payments… But since
we expanded the market for payments overall, we
gave Visa far more business than we took. The
overall dynamic was net positive, unlike Napster’s
negative-sum struggle with the U.S. recording
industry. As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent
markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much
as possible. (57)
A monopoly business gets stronger as it gets bigger:
the fixed costs of creating a product (engineering,
management, office space) can be spread out over
ever greater quantities of sales. Software startups
can enjoy especially dramatic economies of scale
because the marginal cost of producing another copy
of the product is close to zero.
…Service businesses especially are difficult to make
monopolies. …You can hire more instructors and
expand to more locations, but your margins will
remain fairly low and you’ll never reach a point where
a
core group of talented people can provide something
of value to millions of separate clients, as
software engineers are able to do.
A good startup should have the potential for great
scale built into its first design. (51)
One you’re 10x better, you escape competition. (49)
(About merger between Elon Musk’s X.com and
Confinity) As a unified team, we were able to ride out
the dot-com crash and then build a successful
business. (42)
In the world of business, at least, Shakespeare proves
the superior guide. Inside a firm, people become
obsessed with their competitors for career
advancement. Then the firms themselves become
obsessed
with their competitors in the marketplace. Amid all the
human drama, people lose sight of what matters
and focus on their rivals instead.
