Why? Because they’ve escaped competition and become at least a little monopoly-like. Neither the promise nor the warning has been borne out: business owners are often comfortable and sometimes rich. And it was Marx’s warning: businesses will compete so viciously that nobody will get any money, and eventually even the capitalists themselves will long for something better. This was the promise of the classical economists: capitalism will optimize for consumer convenience, while keeping businesses themselves lean and hungry. But the average Indian restaurant is in an economic state of nature, and its life will be nasty, brutish, and short.

You can earn enough money to live, and to not immediately give up in disgust and go into another line of business (after all, if you didn’t earn that much, your competitors would already have given up in disgust and gone into another line of business, and your task would be easier). If you automate every process that can be automated, mercilessly pursue efficiency, and work yourself and your employees to the bone – then you can just barely compete on price. Want to open an Indian restaurant in Mountain View? There will be another on the same street, and two more just down the way. But the basic economic argument goes like this: In a normal industry (eg restaurant ownership) competition should drive profit margins close to zero. Gwern’s look at commoditizing your complement almost does (as do some tweets). Three sections especially struck me: on monopolies, on secrets, and on indefinite optimism.Ī short review can’t fully do justice to the book’s treatment of monopolies. The book has various pieces of advice for such entrepreneurs. But the greatest entrepreneurs bring something “from 0 to 1” – they invent something that has never been seen before. The title comes from Thiel’s metaphor that ordinary businessmen like restaurant owners take a product “from 1 to n” (shouldn’t this be from n to n+1?) – they build more of something that already exists. Thiel asked if he wanted to make them into a book together. He posted his notes on Tumblr after each lecture.

Stanford student Blake Masters took Peter Thiel’s class on startups. Zero To One might be the first best-selling business book based on a Tumblr.

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