[oblio]

The book's description is ridiculous:

> The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Copying others takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace; they will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.

Both Gates and Brin "copied" existing ideas and improved them. CP/M and Altavista (I think?). So both examples are of people going from 1 to n, not 0 to 1 as they seem to be suggesting.

Going from 0 to 1 brings you a lot of praise for being a pioneer or innovator, but rarely money. Going from 1 to n seems to at least as hard and it's where the money is.

[pjscott]

This doesn't fit as well in a blurb, but a more precisely-stated version of Thiel's thesis is that, since truly competitive markets tend to drive down profit margins, you want to have some big advantage that's hard for competitors to duplicate. MS-DOS's big, hard-to-duplicate advantage was the IBM PC, and Google's advantage is that their search engine was just so much better than others in the early days -- it had a much better ranking algorithm and didn't bloat up its pages trying to be a "portal". For another example, consider Facebook: its advantage is that approximately everybody's friends are on Facebook, and not on, say, Google Plus.

Does that sound more reasonable?

[markhall]

Read the book, it's actually considered one of the best business books of recent years. Despite the title, Thiel covers countless important areas of the entrepreneurial journey to great ideas -> great businesses

[aidenn0]

Almost all writing I've read from the paypal mafia is ridiculous. Granted they've done some cool stuff, but there is a reason that Robert Downy Jr. decided that when he needed to play an eccentric comic-book millionaire, he followed Musk around.