Zero to One

The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.

All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.

If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.

Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.

you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.

The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.

As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.

people then products then traffic then revenue.

A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too.

if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.

the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places,

Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.