Forget Capitalism -- Long Live Monopolies!
The business book category overflows with how-to tomes on entrepreneurship. They often read like self-help manuals with detailed checklists, fill-in-the-blank financial statements and advice on raising capital. They're tactical and specific. They're rarely philosophical. And they never argue against capitalism.
"If you're an entrepreneur building one of these companies, you always want to build a monopoly," said Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, an early investor in Facebook and now a prominent venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.
This idea is one of many unconventional – and sometimes provocative – arguments Thiel lays out in Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. The book originated from a class he taught on start-ups at Stanford in 2012. Thiel's philosophy is rooted in the idea that true innovation is rare.
"When you see something new, that you haven't heard, that's something one should always overvalue," he told Charlie Herman, host of WNYC's Money Talking. Founders, Thiel believes, should focus in places where no one is working and move there in a big way. Forget about iterating or improving on existing ideas, that's small ball. In fact, the title of Thiel's book – Zero to One – refers to that moment of creation, when something completely new is created from nothing. The incredible iPhone 6 released in September is beautiful technology, but it's not truly innovative. Now, the first iPhone. The one Steve Jobs showed the world in 2007? That changed the game.
Thiel takes on another kernel of tech industry wisdom: disruption.
For some time, it's been fashionable to focus on "disrupting" existing industries. See something out there and do it a better way. But Thiel disagrees. "What you always want to be doing as a company is creating value," he said. "Even if there are some big, bureaucratic, old companies, value doesn't come from destroying them. It comes from creating new things,"
