Zero to One Book Review

I just finished Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One and wanted to spend some time to review the book and put in writing what I have learned and how it relates to ProjectionHub.

First of all the book was excellent.  It was a quick read and it outlined a number of concepts that I have never heard or thought of in the past.  There were a ton of concepts that I thought were incredibly valuable for startup entrepreneurs.  Here were a couple concepts I noted and how they relate to ProjectionHub:

1.  Create a Monopoly – Much of Peter’s premise in this book is that in order to build a successful, sustainable, profitable company, you should look for opportunities to create a monopoly.  He explores several examples of companies that are large today that started by controlling a small niche market and then moved to other markets once they understood the model in a small market.  Examples include:

• Facebook started by dominating Harvard’s campus first then moved to other universities one a time.
• PayPal started by dominating payments for eBay power sellers
• Amazon started by dominating book sales

Taking this lesson to ProjectionHub I think we need to focus on creating the best financial model for one industry at a time.  Rather than trying to create a financial projection tool that is the best for everyone, create a great model for SaaS, then Mobile, then eCommerce etc.

2.  Think about Quantum Leap Improvements – Peter really pushes back against the Lean Startup philosophy which is to make small incremental improvements quickly.  He suggests that all of the great companies built a solution that was 10x better than the alternative.  For example, PayPal was 10x faster than paying by check for items on eBay.  Amazon had 10x the number of books than even your largest book store.

So at ProjectionHub we have to make sure that our financial projection tool is at least 10x as good as an Excel template.

I would definitely suggest that you pick up a copy of this book and learn some great counter intuitive concepts about taking your business from Zero to One.