1 To purchase a personal subscription or corporate license, please visit us at www.TheBusinessSource.com or ill out the simple request form at www.TheBusinessSource.com/contact-us. All Rights reserved. Reproduction or redistribution in whole or in part without prior written permission of The Business Source is strictly prohibited. In business, every breakthrough innovation only happens once. There may be another Bill Gates one day, but he won’t create a world-beating operating system. Nor will the next Larry Page or Sergey Brin make an incomparable search engine. Nor will the next Mark Zuckerberg create a ubiquitous social network. Lighting never strikes the same way twice. The thing is, if you aspire to become the next Gates, Brin or Zuckerberg, it’s awfully tempting to try and copy them. After all, it’s far easier to simply copy a proven model than to go and create something new. But according to Peter Thiel - the co-founder of PayPal, successful venture capitalist, and author of Zero to One - if you’re merely copying these innovators, you aren’t learning from them. “Doing something that folks already know how to do takes the world from one to two,” explains Thiel. “You’re merely adding one more unit to something that’s already familiar. But when you create something that’s truly new, you take the world from zero to one. The act of creation is singular, and the result is something fresh, and quite possibly amazing.” Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything Thiel has learned as a co-founder of PayPal and as an investor in dozens of successful startups, including Facebook and LinkedIn. Thiel’s book asks the questions any budding entrepreneur must answer to succeed in the business of doing new things. His book isn’t intended to be a step-by-step manual, because every business is different (or at least, every business should be different). Rather, Zero to One is intended to be an exercise in thinking. It’s meant to plant a seed that may one day grow into something new, and great. The World Needs More Tech Start-Ups If you’re working in a large corporation or government organization, it’s extremely dificult to take a new innovation from zero to one. Large corporations are more interested in copying or reining products and services that have already been proven to work. Bureaucratic hierarchies tend to move slowly, and entrenched Zero to One Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future By Peter Thiel