Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

I just finished reading Peter Thiel’s book: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. The book is full of interesting lines. Here’s a sample: 

“The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. 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.”

“Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. 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 best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.” 

“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.” 

“Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.”

“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.”

Theologies without Gods & sandcastle of reason: Hegel, ideology & the modern mind

The grand Western experiments of capitalism and socialism, for all their claims to rationality and moral superiority, are ultimately unworkable—not because they lack systems, but because they are scaffolded upon a myth. This myth, secular in appearance but theological in structure, is the Hegelian vision of history: a teleological arc stretching toward perfection, culminating in what Hegel called the Age of Reason.

Hegel, that high priest of modern historicism, carved history into three epochs: the Age of the Orient, the Age of the Greeks, and the final act—our supposed present—the Age of Reason. In his schema, the world was moving inexorably toward rational freedom, and he believed, with stunning arrogance, that this culmination found its clearest expression in his own mind and moment. Western ideologies, both capitalist and socialist, have since inherited this progressive dogma, each imagining themselves as the final vehicle for history’s fulfillment.

For over a century, capitalism and socialism have clashed with ferocious conviction, each claiming to be reason’s true emissary. The capitalists anoint themselves the stewards of rational liberty and individual enterprise, dismissing socialists as nihilistic, collectivist, and irrational. The socialists, in turn, present themselves as the harbingers of justice and equality, branding capitalists as exploitative, imperialist, and irredeemably bourgeois.

But both stand on sand.

The very notion of an “Age of Reason” is itself a fiction—an Enlightenment-era gospel that mistakes abstraction for truth. The human mind, for all its brilliance, is not a beacon of pure reason but a fog of impulses, myths, intuitions, fears, and desires. We do not choose our ideologies with the precision of philosophers; we inherit them, feel them, absorb them through culture and trauma and convenience. At the individual and civilizational level, it is nearly impossible to distinguish where reason ends and myth begins.

And so, what masquerades as history’s march toward rational perfection is often nothing more than the clash of competing irrationalities, each wrapped in the robes of logic. Hegel believed himself to be the apex of reason—yet his own philosophy, when stripped of its pomp, reveals the bones of mythology: a secular eschatology promising salvation not in heaven, but in history.

To see the world clearly, one must first renounce the illusion that it is fully knowable. Neither capitalism nor socialism has a monopoly on truth, for truth—if it exists at all—does not reside in systems. It resides, fleetingly, in doubt.

On Capitalism & Socialism

Capitalism and socialism are good at accumulating power, wealth and information. But they are not successful in acquiring wisdom. Being bereft of wisdom, the culture in capitalist and socialist societies is an easy prey to atheism and nihilism.