If we didn't have as many regulations, his "ideal" would be innovation in something "better."

The probability of someone releasing something that makes your work obsolete is greatly reduced if you work on something nobody else does. That's one of the ideas in Peter Thiel's Zero to One.

(didn't get it, read "Zero to One" Peter Thiel)

Meltdown by T. Woods (cool guy, Austrian Economy)

The Witcher by A. Sapkowski (Fantasy, but It reads well only in polish language)

I think the article is not accurate or maybe the author didn't include Thiel's opinion on timing for the sake argument.

This move just deepens YC's monopoly in its domain, as sama would say, "in the Peter Thiel sense."

Highly recommend. Not an easy read but full of great insight by Thiel.

>... enjoy more free time now by reducing work hours than to bet on an uncertain future.

Unknowingly or not, you've just echoed a chapter in Peter Thiel's book Zero to One with such perfect clarity, Mr Thiel may start to look like a savant.

old man and the sea - Hemingway - good read

sapiens (currently reading) - Yuval Noah Harari - fantastic till now

What if (still reading) - Randall Munroe - an interesting read

It's the most thought provoking book I've ever read on entrepreneurship and some of Peter Theil's stories are jaw-dropping. It's the first book that has had me thinking I'm actually a pretty conventional thinker and not nearly ambitious enough.

and because taxi companies don't already compete with car ownership.

sure.

Zero to One - Peter Thiel

Traction Book - Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares

Currently Reading:

How to win friends and influence people - Dale Carnegie

The premise of the book, on the higher value of inventing totally new things rather than copying, sounded good to me.

Peter Thiel in "Zero to One" has a great chapter on "Last-Mover Advantage".

For me, it's hard to say, because we can't see what talent is in the farm systems. Also, we often won't see innovation happen in ways we can predict.

There are some good things written on this topic that you have probably seen - e.g. Paul Graham has some great posts on this as do Sam Altman, Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris.

On the non-YC side Peter Thiel's Zero to One, Marc Andreessen's archives (on the A16Z site) and Chris Dixon's pre-crypto writings are all great on this topic too....

I think that he agrees on Andreessen about the importance of timing, but he doesn’t consider timing alone a recipe for a successful business.

Also Thiel seems more focused on technology as a whole, rather than the software-centric position adopted by Andreessen.

I think that both views have pros and cons, and that we would benefit from trying to find the greatest common denominator between the two approaches—instead of discarding that or this view.

PS: I read and enjoyed Zero to One, and I’d like to learn more about Andreessen views. If anyone has any suggestion...

Refinement is taking existing tech and moving it up (e.g. 10 to 30).

Thiel argues real game changer tech emerges when it brings us from 0 to 1. From nothing to something huge.

Was it legal? Apparently yes. So, what is the problem?

Edit: to be fair, I am a little biased because Thiel's book 'Zero to One' was very useful, and I have never got value from Gawker.

Interestingly, Peter Thiel starts his book Zero To One with a reference to the Anna Karenina principle by showing a corollary in business: "All happy companies are different, all unhappy companies are alike."

India has, perhaps, relied too heavily on the 1 to N promise of globalisation and, in the process, won in a race to the bottom.

Wow!

I thought a lot about these questions since I'm managing a startup accelerator. Now I feel like I understood more to them and wanted to share it.

I welcome any feedback on the questions or on my interpretations :)

Zero To One by Peter Thiel

The Art Of Profitability by Adrian Slywotzky

The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

You'll probably get a lot of practical suggestions on processes from others here, but I really enjoyed Peter Thiel's Zero to One book. It's not 100% relevant since he rambles pretty hard throughout and a lot of it needs a pinch of salt since he's so contrarian, but there's a lot of really good gems in there about how to build something legitimately new to create your own pie of income (including chapters on marketing, pricing, etc), instead of building something to get a small slice of an existing market.

The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Strategy Rules - Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs by David B. Yoffie, Michael A. Cusumano

These are all timely books and recently written.

"The Four Steps to the Epiphany" - I got a very detailed view on customer development.

"Zero to One" - got some fresh ideas on how to think differently wrt business.

"Dhandha: How Gujaratis Do Business" - collection of stories , which highlight why/how Gujaratis are so successful in businesses.

Which was an insight in Blue Ocean Strategy (Kim & Mauborgne, 2005).

And before that, if you squint, in Competitive Strategy (Porter, 1980) and Competitive Advantage (Porter, 1980).

And the B-school theorists basically got their ideas by peeking over the fence of the Economics dept at how monopolies are formed and abuse their power and saying "hey, let's teach that to our students".

Rule of thumb for anything, the harder books to read are often the best. So not simple blogs. Good ideas are difficult to explain.

I'd say Lean Startup and Zero to One actually lie on the "easy to understand" categories. The YC related stuff is a little harder but worth the effort.

Here's the best books that I've read in the past few months:

> Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale

I remember disliking the movie, but the book is brilliant and hilarious. Autobiography of one of the boldest, horniest, and most brilliant con artists.

> Ghost In The Wires by Kevin Mitnick

On the same topic, autobiography of a great hacker. Extremely clever and awesome. I bet people here will love it.

> Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Very intelligent and inspiring book about startups and new technologies. A lot of new and great ideas, I've enjoyed it a lot.

> iWoz

Autobiography of Steve Wozniak. Also wonderful and super positive and inspiring story.

> Trust me, I'm lying.

Book about how modern social media is being manipulated. Short and interesting. Makes you think differently about what you read on the internet.

> On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

Theory of how human mind works. Must read for everyone who is into AI, but also a great book for everyone else.

Freakonomics- Interesting book if you're into Game theory and economics kind of stuff, though it has no prerequisites

Meditations- Great views of a stoic thinker

Zero to one- Interesting take on startups and how to build them

Foundation and empire- Amazing sci-fi book. Second book in the foundation series

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

For that matter "Zero to One" also argues that people should aim high and do important things.

I think if they had a very unique value proposition in order to avoid competition, they'd be in good shape. Maybe a CMS just for a specific industry.

If you want to understand the business world, the management aspect of it, I suggest reading Peter Drucker's Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices.

If you want to get better at networking, I would suggest reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

If you want to understand marketing, I would suggest, Marketing: An Introduction by Philip Kotler

Peter Thiels' book Zero to One might be a good starting point to understand the start-up world.

But for a general instinct about business, you have to stay curious and learn how people think and behave. Being curious about anthropology, psychology, economics, news, trends, sociology are key.

- Inspired

- The Product Manager's Desk Reference

- The Lean Startup

- Agile Product Management with Scrum

Targeted at interview preparation, but good for breadth:

- Decode & Conquer

- Cracking the PM interview

Other good books for PMs:

- Talking to Humans

- Hooked

- The Design of Everyday Things

- Zero to One

- Traction

I don't see that as a problem, but I also don't see it as a sustainable process. Maybe that doesn't matter since VC fund performance is such a hall of mirrors that having the magic investment criterion is better than having the best numbers.

There is certainly nothing wrong with prompting entrepreneurs to aim for that kind of a business.

I use Superhuman, wear Atoms, own a Patagonia fleece vest, occasionally read The Information, have read Sapiens and Zero to One… I don't know whether to be embarrassed or amused.

Bravo

In some ways this is good, but in others—a la Peter Thiel in Zero to One[1]—it isn't: if so many computers are "good enough," that indicates that innovation in the sector has slowed and that many people don't find the newer models compelling.

Another reading could be, "No killer apps take advantage of much faster processors and interconnects."

[1] My thoughts: http://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/24/zero-to-one-peter-thiel-an....

In the book, he describes how one of their engineers, exasperated by their competitor, X.com, matching them feature for feature, designed a bomb to blow it up. It probably would have been more shocking were it not for the fact that four out of the six key people at the company had designed bombs in high-school. He didn't go through with it and, instead of an explosion, the companies fused.

This is just an anecdote; Thiel has incredible insights and the eloquence to make them useful.

It was kind of like when I learned how to program - what I read in his book - gave me a new lens to interpret how or what I saw in the world. It created a crack that made me wonder what else I wasn't seeing or able to see.

There was a page in there about secrets in plain sight and it bothered me for years because I couldn't understand what he meant until I finally read Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday.

Thiel here argues that America, to counter China, needs to become a lot more like China.

The idea that "competition" is bad because it makes you copy your enemy is the most valuable insight in the book Zero to One by Thiel and Masters, yet here he doesn't seem to be using that insight at all.

Personally I think Peter talking at the RNC and [hopefully for me] exerting some kind of influence on Trump is the best thing to happen. I still see Trump as a blank slate. With his presidency [IMO] inevitable I think it's super important that people like Peter start steering him in the right direction.

Anything that forcibly makes boards larger is probably bad for companies, regardless of the goodness of intentions. If you do not believe requirements like Goldman's will increase board sizes, then you must believe that all companies are willing to fire some number of current board members to meet quota, which seems unlikely.

Peter Thiel in Zero to One:

> A board of three is ideal. Your board should never exceed five people, unless your company is publicly held. (Government regulations effectively mandate that public companies have larger boards—the average is nine members.) By far the worst you can do is to make your board extra large. When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization. If you want that kind of free rein from your board, blow it up to giant size. If you want an effective board, keep it small.

More board members may increase intransigence, decrease oversight (cover over who is really making the decisions and who is not), and turn corps more bureaucratic. Regardless of who is joining the board, this is going to increase board sizes, and that's pretty unfortunate for some philosophies of effective management.

It is not that [xyz] representation isn't a problem, but that an effective company structure must be the foremost requirement, ahead of any other (more arbitrary or ephemeral) requirements. Or else there won't be as many great companies to steward in the first place.

> The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.

> This implies two very strange rules for VCs. First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. This is a scary rule, because it eliminates the vast majority of possible investments. (Even quite successful companies usually succeed on a more humble scale.) This leads to rule number two: because rule number one is so restrictive, there can’t be any other rules.

Also... Peter Thiel was a huge Trump supporter. Dude obviously has some blind spots.

The Lean Startups is great...

Thinking, Fast and Slow is amazing but not sure it's really a startup book.

E-myth is great.

Art of war is awesome as is The Prince

A+ on "How To Win Friends and Influence People" it's an amazing book.

One of my key takeaways from this book is that if you hold people to a high standard of ethics and talent they usually won't let you down. Saying something like "I'm going to appoint you to this project as everyone on the team says you're responsible, motivated, and ethical" ... they won't let you down because that's how they view themselves inside.

- How to Build a Startup (Steve Blank on Udacity)

- CS183/Zero to One (Peter Thiel)

- CS184: Startup Engineering (Balaji S. Srinivasan)

Best:

Pando Monthly: interviews by Sarah Lacy with founders and VCs. Many go for two or three hours. She goes beyond the PR story and touches on details, doubts, decisions.

This Week in Startups: interviews by Jason Calacanis. You'll learn things that are not in the PR story. Check out the Uber interview with Travis Kalanick for some gore inceptions details..

- Founders at Work (book by Jessica Livingston)

- any book you find by someone who's done it before. VCs, founders, etc. Relevant books can be Jordan Mechner's book about Prince of Persia, Eric Schmidt about Google, Masters of Doom. These contain gems about crucial moments and how people went about doing things, building product, distribution, relations. Peeking behind the curtain.

Competition is important, but to drive efficiency - weed out bad ideas and bring down costs of already created innovations. But the thing that usually drives monoliths out of business is... new monoliths.

The somewhat contrarian takeaway is that some (keyword) amount of consolidation is good.

- The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan - It gave me the tools required to cut through bullshit and helped me free myself from the shackles of a religious upbringing

- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins - Gave me the courage to look at things differently when everyone thinks we know it all

- Zero to One by Peter Thiel - It made me question what I was doing professionally and I now have a list of questions to answer whenever I am in a startup to help guide me

- Compersion by Hypatia From Space - It help remove limits to how I can love and care for the people that are important to me.

"... or knowledge of any secrets"

Did you read Zero to One? :)

"you may be less likely to believe in your idea when times get tough, because it is not deeply rooted in your experiences."

This is by far the point that resonates most with me from all the comments. Fair dos - point taken.

-Organized an event for +200 people with +10 sponsors for a non-profit.

-Read amazing books, most notably: Zero to One, The Innovator's Dilemma, Good to Great and A Brief History of Time; among others.

-Considerably improoved my competitive programming skills

-Made various sites, I'm rocking on front-end dev

-Went to India to teach various subjects to unprivileged kids

-Went to Dubai to share time with my dad after having him away for 19 years

-Traveled to the US 2 times (Florida and North Virginia)

-Have written essays which really smart people are debating around the internet

-Despite the heavy workload, I'm keeping up with college

On the other, Palantir, based on what we know about it, is the embodiment of what I do not want in society. I am not sure I am happy what he did with Gawker debacle.

In other words, I am kinda interested in his gospel, but I am not sure I like what that gospel results in.

Here's my 2016 reading list:

#1. Zero to One - Peter Thiel - 3.5*

#2. The Alchemis - Paulo Coelho - 3.5*

#3. Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston - 3*

#4. Traction - Gabriel Weinberg - 4.5*

#5. How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie -4*

#6. Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations... - Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber - 4*

#7. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work - Mason Currey - 3*

#8. Rich Dad, Poor Dad - Robert T. Kiyosak - 3*

#9. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs... - Eric Ries - 4.5*

#10. Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly - Bernadette Jiwa - 3*

#11. Elon Musk: Inventing the Future - Ashlee Vance - 4*

#12. Rework - Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson - 4.5*

#13. Anything You Want - Derek Sivers - 4.5*

#14. South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami - 3.5*

#15. As A Man Thinketh / The Path Of Prosperity - James Allen - 4*

Currently I'm reading If This Is a Man / The Truce by Primo Levi - and so far it seems to be one of the top 3 books I've read this year - definitely a 4+* book.

Then again it's also possible that he's massively inconsistent and full of contradictions. Humans are not perfectly philosophically consistent robots. Contradiction is more normal than not. Peoples' beliefs often come more from emotional affinities and cultural bias than reason.

"Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. If you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business."

- Peter Theil, Zero to One

General

====

- Master & Margarita (w reader's guide)

- Why we sleep

- The righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion

- The wisdom of insecurity

- The denial of death

- The three body problem (friend's advice: slow burn, stick with it)

- The dubliners

- The devils (Dostoyevski)

- The name of the rose

- Enten-Oller (Kierkegaard)

- Zero to one (Peter Thiel, recommended reading as palantir new joiner - not fantastic but has some thought provoking ideas; i.e. which very important truth would very few people agree with you on?)

Economy/finance

===

- Basic economics (Thomas Sowell)

- How an economy grows and why it crashes

- Know the city

Math

===

- Coffee time in Memphis

- Real analysis (mathematics textbook)

- Problems from the book (Halfway through this one, and I found it really enjoyable, even with only a CS bachelors)

If anyone has read any and has feedback/notes, I'm looking forward to hearing them!

Peter Thiel has an interesting take on sales in his book Zero to One. He makes the case that good selling and good teaching are pretty much the same thing.

The best teachers know how to sell the topic they teach. K-12 teachers in particular know in their bones how crucial a sales perspective is to getting an important message across.

The best salespeople sell in a way that doesn't seem like selling. Thiel gives the example Steve Jobs. It almost seems strange to call what he did sales, but that's essentially what he did when he got on stage. Another example, is Elon Musk, who gets his message across without seeming very much like a salesperson. It's probably no coincidence that both figured out good ways to inspire their audiences.

So if the word "sell" makes you want to run for the door, consider the more or less equivalent form: communicate. Or, maybe "educate." If you think salespeople are all liars, focus your "sales" efforts on conveying facts in the most compelling way possible - without lying. I find that from this perspective, the idea doesn't seem nearly as bad. It also presents a much more actionable path forward.

https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/080...

Thiel takes them to task in Zero to One. Worth reading just for that.

Overview books:

* Inspired

* The Product Manager’s Desk Reference

* The Lean Startup

* Agile Product Management with Scrum

Interview preparation (good for breadth, even if you’re not applying for jobs):

* Decode & Conquer

* Cracking the PM interview

Other good books for PMs:

* Hooked

* The Design of Everyday Things

* Zero to One

* Traction

Tribes - Seth Godin

The Four Agreements - Miguel Angel Ruiz (life changing) The

Seven Spiritual Laws of Success - Deepak Chopra

These are some that I am reading/read recently.

No.

Competition and Capitalism are literally antithetical. This is outlined better than I could ever explain in Zero To One by Peter Thiel, but in essence:

Capitalism is all about, including in its very name, the access to and deployment of Capital. Competition destroys Capital. In its most basic form, think of the airline industry. It's highly competitive, which forces airlines to run razer-thin margins and drop prices. This kills R&D, and while its great for consumers in the short-run, it can actually hurt consumers in the long run because it doesn't even matter if Delta would love to invest more R&D into more efficient planes, allowing them to make them roomier and cheaper; they can't, because they don't have the capital to spend on it.

In the worst case, companies abuse incumbent/monopolistic positions by sitting on their asses and doing nothing with the capital they bring in. That's why a market without competition gets a bad rep. But this isn't always the case, especially in the modern market where companies are deathly afraid of technological disruption.

Competition is necessary, but that doesn't make it a great thing. And it certainly is not a core component of capitalism; it's a core, necessary component of Free Markets.

-Secrets of Sandhill Road

-Hackers and Painters

-The Great CEO within

-Venture Deals

-Predictable Revenue

-Zero to One

-The Hard Thing About Hard Things

-Lean customer development

-Lost and founder

-Lean B2B

-From Impossible to Inevitable

-Traction

Best computer science books:

-Competitive programming 3

-Structure and interpretation of computer programs

Best for fun (non-fiction):

-Meditations

-Sapiens

-How to win friends and influence people

-A brief history of time

-Self-reliance

-Frente a la estrella polar

Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper.

Inner Engineering by Jaggi Vasudev.

Sapiens by Yuval Harari.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

I lost my value in most books in 2010, We have lots of reads in common 2010 and my feeling about books is that lots fall under motivational porn and they provide instant gratification then things you can apply.

Seeing your list now I want to read Arnold Schwarzenegger book Total Recall and tempted to read Zero to One.

I would love to aspire to your level of success you had with CD Baby.

For smaller sass apps, the standard business metrics apply: Customers, Customer Churn, Customer growth, Costs. Protection of IP is important but rarely the differentiating factor in this market, take a look at all the email marketing apps for instance. There is no IP there and nothing particularly new, they just provide excellent service at reasonable cost and are still valuable businesses.

It will be even more interesting to see if their combined insights and approach can increase their chances of identifying these rare black swans.

Regardless, this has to be among the most formidable grouping of startup talent and brains in the valley.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html

I was fortunate to discover the model a year ago with a functioning school. They are fairly rare so probably not an option for you, but if it is, they are often in a price range of 6-8k. Before that, I was going to homeschool my daughter (she's 3.5). Now I work for Baltimore's urban Sudbury school and the place is fantastic.

I also recommend reading Zero to One and think about in the context of traditional schooling. I am working on a series of posts highlighting the connections starting with http://blog.aisudbury.com/post/102537221611/educational-prep...

No Hero - M. Owen;
Zero to One - P. Thiel;
The 7 Principles of Professional Services - S. Anastasi.

"When a cheap laptop beats the smartest mathematicians at some tasks, but even a supercomputer with 16,000 CPUs can’t beat a child at others, you can tell that humans and computers are not just more or less powerful than each other – they’re categorically different."

- Peter Thiel, "Zero to One", Chapter 12

Further discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381723

Disclaimer: since some folks can’t separate explaining something vs agreeing with something, this is just me explaining based on observations and having read Thiels’ book Zero to One. I’m still forming an opinion on the matter.

Did anyone not see this coming in one form or another? Thiel openly supported Trump on the grounds that globalization is bad and that a nationalistic president would slow globalization. He believes globalization is bad because it makes us more like China, a country that produces nothing original and instead clones everything innovative from the world. If I do have an opinion on anything, it that Thiel only supported Trump not because he believed in him, but because he knew it would put the brakes on everything he despised.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/08/thiel-globalization-is-over....

It is certainly possible to beat index funds, many do so, some of them are mostly lucky, some of them are mostly skillful. - That is the trick ain't it? The hole point is that there is no way to distinguish between the two (a priori) and no way to deduct if it will lead to future success (posteriori).

Many replies here would do well to read, re-read, and re-re-read with an introspective mindset. This is perhaps the best quality material I have seen from pg for quite some time. Its clarity is brilliant and the thing I liked most was the second, and to me unexpected section, full of the reasons haters gonna hate.

I speak only for myself, and this is a throwaway, so nothing personal is at stake. This is a very lucid and precise examination of the fine controls at stake in writing. Their natural tension, the details of qualification. In my opinion, which may be trash, who knows, this will be cited for years to come because it is, in fact, true.

A few years ago I saw a keynote at a game development conference talking about how on the app store most developers copy successful games. The presenter (David Whatley) called it mining for gold where others have already turned up every nugget possible (paraphrased because it's been a while...).

I think that's a good way to look at this as well. As a user of statuspage.io I can tell you that they leave a lot to be desired + their pricing isn't attractive. They have however a pretty robust and compelling solution.

Can you do something that will make me leave statuspage.io (after spending hours customizing my page) and _need_ to move over to your service? If so the answer is GO FOR IT and don't look back. I have a feeling the answer is no, and that's why you're unsure, at which point I'd start looking for other problems to solve.

Peter Thiel makes a good argument in his book Zero to One that every company needs to be designed to be a monopoly. While I disagree with some of that (competition is healthy), as a founder I know the importance of your differentiator being leaps ahead and not just an update away.

P.S. - The reason we pay for statuspage.io is because we don't have to build (and maintain) the whole management system and don't want to worry about it. For any legit company it's worth it.

Zero to One, Peter Thiel: http://zerotoonebook.com/

Also plan on starting "Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!"

Permutation City - Greg Egan

Revival - Stephen King

Glasshouse - Charles Stross

The City - Dean Koontz

Non-fiction:

Predictable Revenue - Aaron Ross

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World - Steven Johnson

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation - Jon Gertner

How Doctors Think - Jerome Groopman

Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up To Biotech's Brave New Beasts - Emily Anthes

Zero to One - Peter Thiel

Also, I understand that Amazon includes 'System Events' in their free tier. Even with this included, at an average of 15 custom events + 5 system events, you can have 5MM sessions a month for FREE. This is more than enough for bootstrapped companies/projects to start and grow with.

I'm not sure who the customers for these analytics companies are (small projects that grow with them vs big projects that join them) but if it is the latter, well Amazon is def. the better choice. Although they do not offer any complex funnels/segmentation, I am sure this and other features will be added in the future.

Thinking about Peter Thiel's monopoly vs competition eating profits (Zero to One, awesome book!), I wonder if and how players in this space will be able to differentiate themselves enough to really have a competitive advantage over one another.

Am I to that assume all of YC is adopting Thiel's beliefs as well? To be clear, I'm not saying both views are mutually exclusive.

As a software engineer, I've come to really love how good products are built and how to explore new markets. While I don't think it's a life-changing book, it's certainly a good read and I'd recommend it to any engineer that wants to be more product-focused (also Inspired, Creativity Inc, and Zero to One)

If you want to read about rent seeking, read Peter Theil's "Zero to One". It's a manual on rent-seeking. It's all about how to create a monopoly.

Changing Government policy to reduce rent-seeking is very tough politically. Successful rent-seekers are the biggest political contributors. They pay to not have their income stream cut off.

[1] https://hbr.org/2017/06/is-america-encouraging-the-wrong-kin...
[2] https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm

"Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous. Ever since Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo! in mid-2012, she has worked to revive the once-popular internet giant by making it cool again. In a single tweet, Yahoo! summarized Mayer’s plan as a chain reaction of “people then products then traffic then revenue.” The people are supposed to come for the coolness: Yahoo! demonstrated design awareness by overhauling its logo, it asserted youthful relevance by acquiring hot startups like Tumblr, and it has gained media attention for Mayer’s own star power. But the big question is what products Yahoo! will actually create. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he didn’t just make Apple a cool place to work; he slashed product lines to focus on the handful of opportunities for 10x improvements. No technology company can be built on branding alone."- [1]

[1] - Zero to One Book by Peter Thiel

That's an interesting origin story.

I was curious to see the notes in question. Found them here, for anyone else interested: http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup

Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a great startup managerial book. It chronicles Ben Horowitz's struggles as CEO of LoudCloud. Probably most appropriate for more mature startups.

"When a cheap laptop beats the smartest mathematicians at some tasks, but even a supercomputer with 16,000 CPUs can’t beat a child at others, you can tell that humans and computers are not just more or less powerful than each other – they’re categorically different."

"Palantir takes a hybrid approach: the computer would flag the most suspicious transactions on a well designed user interface, and human operators would make the final judgement as to their legitimacy."

- Peter Thiel, "Zero to One", Chapter 12

Thiel is going long on these AI+human startups.

From the Cray culture (and some of the Cray employees) we got the IRIX release train, where we'd ship a new QA'd release every quarter. If a feature wasn't ready it just got pushed out to the next release, no big deal (sometimes this didn't work out; bizarrely one of the biggest screwups came from the CXFS guys who were working in the old Cray campus in Eagan, MN).

[1]: Though as I read Zero to One it's interesting to see Theil's perspective on process-vs-product outlook. Definitely the product-driven SGI was the more optimistic one.

- Read Edward DeBono's "Serious Creativity" - the most brilliant book about generating ideas I've ever encountered. Not about startups or apps in particular, but very interesting.

-There are startup ideas threads on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836508

and https://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/

- If you're good at android development - please, PLEASE build a good text editor. It is the most important app for me, the first thing I look for in any new device, and all android text editors suck SO MUCH. I would easily spend $10-$30 if you would build something like Editorial, that would be convenient to use on android smartphone.

-----

- Think if there's something in your life that's missing, some tool that you would like to use, and build that.

- If that fails - think about the perfect niche, about people you like and respect, who use technology and/or could benefit from it; understand them deeply, identify their goals, problems, challenges; and build something for them.

- If that fails - look for a different not tech-related hobby. Like music or writing or woodworking or something like that. Whatever makes you the most curious. That will help you with burnout, and will give you a great niche to work in. Then identify the problems you're facing, and solve them with technology.

- If that fails - talk to other people and ask if there's anything they might need, if there's any problems they have, etc.

- Also - check out new mobile OS'es, like Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS, etc. These are new, emerging ecosystems, where there's plenty of apps to build. You can simply look at the most successful iOS/Android apps, and copy them to these platforms.

Peter Thiel writes about how fatal machine learning for fraud detection in his book, "Zero to One".

At Paypal, Max Levchin assembled an elite team of mathematicians to study the fraudulent transfers in detail. Then we took what we learned and wrote software to automatically identify and cancel bogus transactions in real time. But it quickly became clear that this approach wouldn't would either. After an hour or two, the thieves would catch on and change their tactics. We were dealing with an adaptive enemy and our software couldn't adapt in response.

The fraudsters adaptive evasions fooled our automatic detection algorithms, but we found that they didn't fool our human analysts as easily. So max and his engineers rewrote the software to take a hybrid approach: the computer would flag the most suspicious transactions on a well designed user interface, and human operators would make the final judgment as to their legitimacy.

I also got Grokking Algorithms this year. I already have a few denser algorithm books, but I really liked this one for the basics. I bought it as a refresher that wouldn't be as dry as reading CLRS, and because I've been recently helping a friend who is beginning a CS degree.

> Mastering Selenium WebDriver. This is probably the only good book on Selenium among so many bad books on this topic.

I have to work with Selenium a lot, and you're right, there are so many terrible books and articles about Selenium. I'm going to look into this one, thanks.

If you want to have better odds next time, I'd advise you to read Zero to One. Think about what your secret is. What are you trying to do, what do you know about, that no one else knows? Then do that.

When you see lots of competitors, it's a pretty good bet you haven't found a secret.

I have thought about this very topic a little because I'm utterly flabbergasted that a book I like as well as Zero to One was written by a Trump delegate. So -- I may be cobbling together more of an excuse here than an explanation, if that's not obvious.

Also, in other Theil news, he gave a truly fantastic commencement speech this year at Hamilton college (the delivery is a little halting or stilted for sure, but honestly I think it's part of the charm): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id4ywg5oemc

One of the interesting points he makes there is to come down on the side of monopoly. I interpreted it as a one-sided position, but I think they were putting forward this one-sided position to stand in contrast to the typical one-sided view of monopoly you often hear -- namely the other side.

Most people are anti-monopoly. Competition s good! But low-margin businesses are like starved animals that will eat your face off to survive. A low-margin business chases out "nice" founders and executives -- they simply don't make it in that environment. You really do have to be an asshole to extract margin from nothing, because part of the way you do that is by squeezing people including your employees. In tight low-margin industries nice people finish last.

Monopolies -- or at least companies in industries with margins and pricing power like software -- can afford to be nice. They can afford to pay higher salaries, be more tolerant of mistakes, give better benefits, have looser schedules, etc. Obviously there are exceptions as people will be people, but on average these industries tend to be nicer places.

Nicer founders and executives can also make it in these industries, and in fact might have an advantage. People want to work with them.

Monopoly like most other things in economics and ecology is a paradox. You (economically speaking) want your employer or company to be a monopoly, but not others. That's because for others you are a customer, so you want them to be subject to brutal competition.

But there's a dark side to monopolies too, namely that they get lazy. The ideal is probably to have some monopoly and pricing power around, but not too much. Like most things in living systems the optimum is somewhere in between and the edges are both pathological.

Peter Thiel's book Zero To One is on pre-order, but you can pre-order and then get a pre-print edition mailed to you. It's based around the class notes in his Stanford startup class. I don't agree with everything but it's a very good perspective. It really helped me get out of the perspective of shitty ideas and to think bigger.

Edit: Ops, got Marc and Ben confused. ;)

Peter Thiel's Zero To One described four pillars that were necessary for a monopoly. It appears Airbnb has most if not all of these.

1. Network effects - this is usually more important than proprietary tech. They have this - global network effect. This is not a "retail company" any more than Amazon's 3rd party marketplace or Alibaba's is.

2. Tech - read blog and decide for yourself. It's easy to imagine at sub-scale also being able to build Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Most of the challenges come at scale (and are protected by #1 above).

3. Brand - the commenters seem to agree they have this.

4. Economies of scale - they have this.

Now futurology is clearly not without it's own issues, and we all know that it is damn hard to make predictions (well, accurate ones anyway) about the future. But I think if nothing else I've been reminded that it's a good idea to at least make some effort to keep up with what the "futurist" crowd are talking about, and also to pull my head up from time to time and look around in domains other than my particular current niche. Materials science? Yay! Energy? Yay! Artificial biology? Yay!

Of course it may be the case that nothing comes from any of this, but it strikes me that it's probably important for an entrepreneur (or would be entrepreneur) to make some effort to stay abreast of this stuff. So I finally finished The Singularity is Near and started looking for good futurist blogs to subscribe to. I feel like I should probably also start reading those "general purpose" science magazines (Sci Am, Discover, Popular Science, New Scientist, etc.) again as well.

What do you guys think? Do you make it a point to keep up with forward looking "stuff" outside of your own domain, or read any "futurist" writing?

We have a different image of China and China has done a great job posing as next superpower but the reality is very different on the ground.

Rich Chinese want to get away from China by paying whatever price they can afford, this is not surprising at all!

I think President Obama played a meta game using technology to win election. President Trump played a meta game using skills developed as a TV host to win election.

I think, in a way, that Peter Thiel’s thesis in the book “Zero to One” is also about playing a meta game to develop monopoly type businesses.

I have always loved using Lisp languages and in a sense continually extending a language to “meet the problem to be solved” is another form of meta game. Rise above the fray, look at things from high altitude, be a good generalist, and win.

Good article.

Exactly, I started reading his book Zero to One and quickly dropped it into trash-bin after scanning randomly. I am not sure why it got rated so high. In my view entire advise boils down to create businesses in uncharted territories and create a monopolies around them.

It's great and it was the first technical book which I read so was kind of interesting. You can skip to the actual part, after Introduction to get to know Bitcoins (and Blockchain) works.

Read these if you haven't already:

- Zero To One, Peter Thiel [1]

- Hooked, Nir Eyal [2]

- The Hard Thing about Hard Things, Ben Horowitz [3]

[0] http://amzn.to/2lgnHrS

[1] http://amzn.to/2yMNvR1

[2] http://amzn.to/2lftjCq

[3] http://amzn.to/2gKv3Cl

*By monopoly, I mean the Peter theil sense of the word, as used in his book Zero to One.

The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

For example, look at the startups, Uber and AirBnb started by explicitly violating laws. Uber has even demonstrated, again and again, contempt for the law.

Then look at the founder-types: Thiel, Gates, Zuckerberg, Jobs, Ellison, etc... They're often anti-social and on the asperger's spectrum. They disregard convention. Violate laws as need be. And can be ruthlessly individualistic/libertarian. Read Thiel's book "Zero to One" or watch the documentary "all watched over by machines of loving grace" for more on this topic.

Look at the stories and discussions posted on this site -- they're often against the grain. There seems to be a keen interest in drugs: psychedelics, MDMA, Ketamine ("as a treatment for depression"), and nootropics ("productivity!"). The libertarians here relish in cryptocurrencies. And there's a prevailing anti-union, anti-socialist, and even anti-SJW attitude: the population here seems to be bright, if isolated, individualistic and perhaps mildly autistic males.

Paul Graham's essays aren't conventional. And other leaders in this domain, such as Naval Ravikant, rail against the "overton window".

Follow up reading:
Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One”

https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/080...

I love working in diverse, multi-ethnic teams, but based on what I've observed more diverse teams seem to be a wash at best in terms of results in the US and are a significant liability in China (possibly due to the demographics of the target market).

Possibly the most egregious example in the US would be Facebook. Not only were the employees narrow demographically, they also went to the same schools, were all in their early twenties or teens and the CEO publicly said like it was important to be "young and technical" and that young people were "just smarter". From everything I've read about it, it was basically run like a frat while it was bulldozing all competition in its path. (Snapchat appears to be a sequel of this story)

What sorts of problem-solving did the study look at? Is there a way to reconcile it with the conflicting outcomes from basically all the hugely successful startups except for Slack (assuming its founding team was diverse)?

I would recommend:

- The Elements of Style, aka, "the Little book". Made me a credible editor (and documentation writer at the time) almost at zero time.

- Zero to One: in-depth, honest, and non-conformist view of the tech startup landscape. "How Google Works" is a close second.

- The Embedded Systems Dictionary. Not in print but the second-hand paperback is worth it. Great refresher, written with a wit.

Another book I use is "The Developer's Guide to Debugging".

In general I like zero-bullshit or more politely, zero fat books. "The Elements of Style" is one. "The Developer's Guide to Debugging" is also very low in fat, war stories and other nonsense.

There are other books that I like that are less influential.

Aphorism: I don't believe in software books. Exceptions are well-researched reference volumes, e.g., "C: A Reference Manual, 5th edition". I believe in undisputed truths, not in one person's preference or experience over another's.

These days I mostly consult manuals and standard documents. Technical books will only give you that much; see them as a vehicle to learn how to learn. Exceptions are again reference handbooks, that will have to be exhaustive.

I don't believe in trainings, fast, slow or anything. Self-learner here, learned reading by myself around the age of 3 (shocking revelation: have you realized that you can only recall detailed memories only after you have learnt how to read?) Actually it was exactly the winter of 1980 (born 1977). I was a serviceable reader by the coming of sprint 1980 and could read subtitles as fast as the adult is assumed to by early 1981. Educated physicist but self-educated programmer.

When asked how he learned about rockets, Musk reportedly said, "I read books."

Here are eight books that shaped the revolutionary entrepreneur:

1. "Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down" by J.E. Gordon
"It is really, really good if you want a primer on structural design," Musk says

2. "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" by Walter Isaacson
"You can see how [Franklin] was an entrepreneur," Musk says.

3. "Einstein: His Life and Universe" by Walter Isaacson
Musk tells Rose he was influenced by the biography of theoretical physicist Albert Einstein

4. "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" by Nick Bostrom
"worth reading" Musk tweeted in 2014.

5. "Merchants of Doubt" by Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes

6. "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding
"The heroes of the books I read always felt a duty to save the world," he says

7. "Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future" by Peter Thiel
Musk says that his Paypal co-founder's book offers an interesting exploration of the process of building super successful companies.

8. The "Foundation" trilogy by Isaac Asimov
Musk says Asimov's books taught him that "civilizations move in cycles," a lesson that encouraged the entrepreneur to pursue his radical ambitions. "Given that this is the first time in 4.5 billion years where it's been possible for humanity to extend life beyond Earth," he says, "it seems like we'd be wise to act while the window was open and not count on the fact it will be open a long time."

Thinking, problem solving related:

Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock: accurate forecasting

Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman: how to avoid bias

Misbehaving: like thinking fast and slow but more hilarious

The checklist manifesto by Atul Gawande: the power of simple process

From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin: lots of mental models to add to your latticework

Business management:

The Outsiders by William Thorndike: capital allocation

The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz: some mental models for managers facing the real-life struggles of startups

Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake masters: for the chapter on what kinds of business are always going to be tough (i.e. ones in perfectly competitive industries)

Worldview:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined

The making of modern economics by Mark Skousen (audiobook): explains various economic ideas through telling the history of the fathers of those ideas.

Investing:

You can be a stock market genius by Joel Greenblatt: where to look for undervaluation

The Essays of Warren Buffett by Lawrence Cunningham: Buffett's thoughts in Buffett's words, neatly categorised by topic

Competition Demystified by Bruce Greenwald: how to identify a high quality business

This can be "direct purchase" like nice clothes, good food, vacations, property, furniture, life insurance, etc. Or it can be an "indirect purchase" in the form of attention which equals money in aggregate since some percent of youtube viewers will spend money downstream as a result of either paying the public speaker or clicking the ad before the youtube vid and paying an advertiser (public speaker gets a cut), etc.

A million writers/public speakers have cropped up because there is a market - people are willing to pay indirectly with their attention - for 'feel good' snake-oil style self-help advice.

The trouble is filtering the signal from the noise where a good filter tends to be whether the person providing you with productivity advice needs your money.

Interestingly, the value of productivity / 'self-help' advice (applied to personal or entrepreneurial life) is usually proportional to the person providing it's net worth. Peter Thiel's 'Zero to One', for example, is excellent.

Most of the time self-help is just a circle jerk though

Of course many of the original Italian Futurists became Fascists too. There seems to be some tendency for unbridled futurist thinkers to fall for fascism and similar ideologies.

Some futurists also go for left-leaning forms of totalitarianism too. I know several really smart authoritarian Marxists.

I see it as a pathology of futurists who have gotten themselves too far from the coal face; of futurists who are not actually Doing The Work (or aren't anymore). There's a temptation to think that politics is the thing holding us back from progress and that progress can be accelerated politically. If we could just get rid of all that slow painful democratic consensus and replace it with some kind of dictatorship of know-it-all smart people all that magic futurist technology would just materialize out of thin air.

There's also this tendency to think regulation is holding us back. That can happen, but it typically happens after things are invented. Regulation is not preventing us from achieving immortality or true AI or free energy because we have no idea how to do those things regardless of whether or not there are laws against them.

Edit: Thiel's case is honestly more mysterious though. Here's a guy who's spent years ranting against the fact that our culture is controlled by know-nothing windbags who don't actually do anything and are hostile to progress and what does he do? He gets behind Donald Trump, a total know-nothing windbag who has absolutely no skills, abilities, or understanding beyond the ability to promote himself and manipulate people. Trump is the emptiest of empty suits. There is literally nothing there except primate dominance gestures. I have no idea what Thiel thought was going to happen, but it's not happening whatever it was.

- "On Intelligence" and "I am a Strange Loop" - how mind works.

- "Rework", "Zero to One", "Start Small, Stay Small" - insightful startup advice.

- Fun autobiographies: Ghost in the Wires (Kevin Mitnick), iWoz (Steve Wozniak), Catch me if you can (Frank Abagnale), Just for Fun (Linus Torvalds), Elon Musk, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

- How companies work: Creativity Inc (Pixar), In the Plex (Google)

- On writing: Art of fiction/nonfiction by Ayn Rand, Story by Robert McKee, Save the Cat, Step by Step to Standup Comedy.

- Other: The Selfish Gene, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Serious Creativity, Hackers & Painters, Hacking Growth, Angel (on angel investing, by Jason Calacanis).

Also collections of essays by Paul Graham [1] and Scott Alexander [2]:

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/2no0sqybnxurpcd/Paul%20Graham%20-%...

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/i43lqpdyd4qa255/The%20Library%20of...

I still sympathize with the end goal of libertarianism: a society in which force and fraud are relegated to history. The problem is that we are nowhere even close to that. Our world is still absolutely ruled by force and deception. Governments are basically large gangs of people with big guns and their authority and power comes from their willingness to use them.

When you pluck isolated ideas out of some future moral utopia and try to apply them here and now, you run into problems around unintended consequences. Getting from here to there requires deeper thinking that takes context into account. We have to chart a course from our current state of affairs to one that is more civilized.

In more concrete terms: when you take a world that's ultimately run by violent gangsters and then take away compensatory "hacks" like wealth redistribution and regulation and public goods expenditures, what you end up with is actually a step back from the kind of future humanistic libertarianism actually envisions. It's basically unilateral disarmament. The gangsters are now free to get more powerful, and they will not return the favor.

    What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

As for the books. I read a lot of them. But, I came with the concept while I was reading "Zero to One" in a subway train. At one moment I got like a recovery of sight. BOOM! I closed the book without intending to open it again.

Slightly strange from the author of 'Zero to One'..

That said, it is certainly better than your typical business book - but that isn't saying much.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel basically implies this with his "Competition is for suckers, monopoly is where it is at". Yet how many businesses and tech companies get founded doing the same think everyone else is doing (or at least half a dozen competitors)?

Truly novel ideas, truly thinking outside the box, truly seeing possibilities that aren't in existence is HARD. Extremely hard. I can understand why the idea that ideas without implementation is meaningless became so prominent, but that is mainly because most of the ideas people have have been had by 1000 other people so if you arne't implementing they aren't of any use.

Whereas ideas that are truly novel are still extremely valuable because it gives all the hard workers something worthwhile to shoot for (as opposed to yet another social media app).

As an example think of blockchain. Fairly basic from a techincal or implementation sense, it is the idea that was really novel. Even if Bitcoin hadn't been made, the idea itself is enormously valuable. There are 1000s of ideas out there like this waiting for a novel thinker to draw them out of the fog and make them clearly visible.

This is one of the big challenges of spreading this model. It is a lean startup. By the way, for those who want to sort of see the school from the eyes of a startup, I wrote a series of blog entries using the ideas of Peter Thiel's Zero to One and making the case that the natural way to prep people for startups (and the future) is a Sudbury education.

http://blog.aisudbury.com/post/102537221611/educational-prep...

It often stems from an analogy to biological evolution, but evolution is a geological-timescale process that occurs over aeons. To use it as a guide to cultural, social, and engineering progress is the naturalistic fallacy not to mention a bit of a category error.

That being said -- I do consider the challenging of the "crappy old OS + virtualization" paradigm unlikely due to the lack of a strong financial incentive to do the work. The amount of work required is waaaaay beyond amateur open source hacker thresholds.

It's possible that this lack of a financial incentive betrays a lack of overall value incentive. Maybe containerization + virtualization, while ugly and ham-fisted, is "good enough" and a more elegant approach just wouldn't have enough "win" to it. A similar situation exists with languages like D, Go, and Rust vs C++. They're better, but they're probably not better enough to displace the incumbent. Peter Thiel's rule on competition (from the incredible book Zero to One) is that an upstart alternative usually has to be 10X better to "disrupt" an established market. I can't imagine a polished-up Plan9-ish OS being 10X better than Linux+Docker+KVM on important metrics. A new OS would have to be 10X as productive to program, 10X less time consuming to admin, 10X more efficient at the use of hardware, 10X more secure, or some combination thereof that amounts to a 10X win.

> Hooked, Nir Eyal.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C1N5WOI?btkr=1

Always reading: Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order: The Phenomenon of Life.

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Predictable Revenue - Aaron Ross, Marylou Tyler

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

The Ultimate Question 2.0 - Fred Reichheld‎

The Singularity is Near - Ray Kurzweil

Moonshot! - John Sculley

Zero To One - Peter Thiel

Republic - Plato

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne

Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy, Fred Wiersema

False Memory - Dean Koontz

NOS4A2- Joe Hill

Revival - Stephen King

Barbarians At The Gate - John Helyar and Bryan Burrough

Into Thin Air - John Krakauer

How To Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

and any collection of the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Read Zero to One, on competition and its downsides and the way you begin to 'clone' your competitors and nobody does anything interesting.

As an engineer starting at Flexport in a couple of weeks, here are some more interesting resources that shaped my thinking:

Interview with Ryan Petersen (Flexport CEO)
https://theblueprint.com/stories/ryan-petersen/

Office hours at startup school 2013 with pg & sama
https://youtu.be/syoqjYLDs48?t=1167

I also happened to have recently read Zero to One.

Plus, Flexport has an appealing mission. Removing friction in something as basic as shipping makes pretty much everyone in the world better off.

The typo about Rob's name is a bit embarrassing. I've asked the editor to correct it.

You are correct, IH was started in 2016, I could have sworn it was started earlier.

It's hard for me to put an exact date on this, but I entered university in 2010 and I remembered reading about startups almost from my first or second year.

Paul Grahams essays, Zero to One, The Family (french thing), Rocket Internet, VC etc.

This whole thing kind of fascinated me, but reading about it felt like watching a soccer game. I was just a spectator of a world I though I could never be a part of. Probably a mix of lack of confidence and unwillingness to takes risks.

But then I discovered this whole bootstrapping thing, IH, Rob's books, Kalzumeus essays and for the first time, I was reading about thing I could see myself doing.

Even though you didn't ask, I hope it clears things up :)

PS: My english being a bit clunky, this article was editorialized quite a bit

PSS: Thanks for the kind words

Why did it fade, though? AT&T was able to fund Bell Labs when it still had a monopoly over the telephone market. The article claims that antitrust laws were relaxed in the 80s, but AT&T was broken up in 1982 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System). This break up lead to increased competition and innovation in telecom, but it did come at the cost of Bell Labs losing funding until eventually being spun off into Lucent.

Peter Thiel argued in the book Zero to One that only monopoly (or pseudo monopoly) businesses can afford to fund surplus salaries and corporate research labs that cost billions of dollars with potentially little or no gain for many years. I would argue that if a corporation exists in a competitive industry, their margins are driven too low to fund basic research.

Also note: even in the U.S. corporations fund a good chunk of basic research in academia: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-govern...

I watched the entire thing (I think close to 3 hours), and about halfway through I came to the realization that both Peter and Eric were using a lot of words... to say basically nothing.

The entire thing was full of truisms and platitudes and overall grievances about the state of science and technology and the slowing down of innovation, with some politics and economics thrown in. Neither of them knew the underlying subjects well, if at all, but had read or heard other people's various takes on them, packaged it up using lots of jargon, and were now spouting it as "wisdom."

It left a very sour taste in my mouth, because I also read Zero to One, and Peter (probably thanks to a very good editor) came across as much more cogent there.

Not long after, he left and did something almost nobody else was doing and the result was Paypal, which made him wealthy and lead to his future as one of the most successful VCs of our era.

Essentially, he said, "Competition is for losers. Go create something nobody else is and build it into a defensible business (i.e. a monopoly on something)."

To me, it's a reminder that people are complex. Peter Thiel is a remarkably lucid thinker, but he was openly homophobic when he was young, while in the closet! Ron Paul is probably the only political candidate I've ever learned anything from, but he also has a history of racism.

Even Trump is complex -- he's not just the arrogant, ignorant character he plays on TV. I found this piece in the NYTimes to be illuminating (sorry if it's a subscription link):

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/campaign-stops/...

Like Peter Thiel and Ron Paul, Trump has contradictions. He is both ignorant and accomplished. He says a lot of bigoted and sexist stuff, but he has also known to be been shrewd in cultivating gay and female executive leadership. It's been said that his best advocates are his children, and that's saying a lot when you compare them to their peers (other children with 3rd generation wealth).

Trump is tapping into a real need that the electorate has, which honestly NEITHER party has an answer for.

Trump probably doesn't have an answer for it either, but acknowledging it is the first step. Honestly, it's probably NOT irrational for lower middle class white men to vote for Trump (over Clinton, at least). I would argue that it was probably irrational for them to vote for Bush, since Bush didn't act in their interests.

As for why Thiel would support Trump, I'm mystified too. But what I would guess it's because he doesn't support either Democrats or the "establishment GOP", which Trump isn't a part of.

Thiel is a contrarian, and in tech social circles, Trump is the ultimate contrarian choice :)

A few years ago I observed myself hearing an interesting author on a podcast. I downloaded the audio book and loved it (Chris Voss, and the book is never split the difference) so I subsequently found every podcast the author was a guest on and listened to all the podcasts. It's really hard to say that the audio book was worth it, because I generally find live conversations more engaging and they make the material easier for me to remember. For non-fiction it might be faster, cheaper and better to just listen to the podcast tour rather than read the book or listen to the audiobook

Currently I'm in this predicament with Scott Galloway and the Algebra of Happiness. I listen to the Pivot podcast, found 20 other podcasts or videos where Scott has been the guest and I'm not sure that the book, or audiobook would have that much value. Honestly, the biggest reason to buy it would be to support the author.

As to the OPs question, there have been a few paper books that I've found very much worth it. Zero to One and Hard Thing About Hard Things are books that I've bought and read multiple times. I also get value out of classic fiction because it's so high quality, inspiring and contributes to shared culture and understanding of the world.

Read Peter Thiel's Zero to One. He talks about competition vs. monopoly. You want to do things that other people aren't doing. He talks about the Harvard MBA grads who chase the last bubble, i.e. getting your timing exactly wrong.

People don't get rich by doing things other people told them to. And people don't get rich by doing "prestigious" things either. Read the parts here about prestige -- it's dead on:

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

(BTW this is also coming from someone who "got lucky" -- can retire in my 30's but never thought about money.)

The Lean Startup - Eric Ries

Coming from a family that has a few small businesses (construction, manufacturing, food), I can tell you that prolonged stress will age and exhaust you very quickly and the recovery doesn't always happen (PTSD has a long lasting affect). I remember reading Peter Thiel's book Zero to One (I think it was his book) where he mentioned being on the floor and dry heaving or where he was curled up in a ball crying/freaking out. I couldn't help but laugh because it's more common then you think.

Working for someone can be stressful but you can walk out if you need to.Running your own business and mortgaging your home and family is insanely stressful. Small business people typically have it the worst, it's not for the faint of heart.

If you're searching for something plain and simple, keeping a repo of Markdown files on GitHub has worked well for me.

I make one file for each book / article / lecture. The material I cover is mostly about tech or entrepreneurship.

https://github.com/tedmiston/notes

Here are a couple of the most complete pages in it:

- Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon - https://github.com/tedmiston/notes/blob/master/books/Show%20...

- Zero to One by Peter Thiel - https://github.com/tedmiston/notes/blob/master/books/Zero%20...

- Startup School Radio #35: Paul Graham - https://github.com/tedmiston/notes/blob/master/podcasts/Star...

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Anyway even Thiel as a “libertarian” is very unique in his thinking. Not many libertarians I know turn around and start companies like Palantir to help governments and police departments build a precog surveillance state. I wonder how he justifies that one given his claims of being libertarian-leaning.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/2/27/17054740/pal...

I disagree with the OP article, I don’t think there is anything AT ALL wrong with Mark Zuckerberg being friends with Republicans. However, the real shame of Mark Z’s association with Peter Thiel is the professional one. Peter was the first check in after Eduardo, $500K. His views would make most capitalists blush, eg “competition is for losers, build a monopoly and extract rents!” He writes as much in his book Zero to One. I bet that had a big effect on what Facebook has become and its view of taking the entire social networking space under itself, and its tactics of taking any data it can and storing it to give itself an advantage (eg in Friends you may Know). Oh sure it may apologize if caught but will continue to store the data.

Mark Z’s earlier attitude of “I dunno why they share the data, those dumb f-cks, they ‘trust me’” found a mentor in Peter Thiel early on to retain that militant guerilla approach even as Facebook had to turn into something more respectable and corporate. “Move fast and break things” gave them all the license they needed.

* Business is more competitive than ever. But in reality, we have more monopolies and duopolies than ever. Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" is all about how to achieve monopoly. Businesses in the US hate competing on price. Without strong antitrust enforcement, which the US hasn't had in decades, the number of players decreases until there's no price competition. How many Internet providers can you choose from in the US? How many in the UK or Germany?

* We live in an age of entrepreneurialism. But the big companies are making all the money. The Economist writes: "A large number of businesspeople who were drawn in by the cult of entrepreneurship encountered only failure and now eke out marginal existences with little provision for their old age." All YC applicants should read that.

* Business is getting faster. They compare the fast rise of the automobile. Electricity and aircraft were also deployed faster than the Internet. Progress in the first 50 years of aviation zoomed like the semiconductor industry. Then in the late 1960s, it was all done - the Concorde, the Boeing 747, the SR-71, and the Saturn V had all flown. Everything since then has been a minor improvement.

* Globalisation is both inevitable and irreversible. The Economist comments "In 1880-1914 the world was in many ways just as globalised as it is today; it still fell victim to war and autarky." The causes of World War One are worth studying. Nobody really wanted it, and it happened anyway. Before WWI, Germany's biggest trading partner was France.

I live in the USA, and I have a difficult time thinking of our political system as being a democracy or a representative democracy. The financial nobility own the government on most issues that matter. I don't even think we have class warfare because the elites have won, game over.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the future, a pleasant waste of time! I expect some form of meritocracy with huge wealth disparity and some form of guaranteed minimum income to keep society functioning. My field (since the early 1980s) is artificial intelligence and machine learning, and I expect to see continued rapid progress in practical automated systems that will replace blue and white collar labor. Society will need to adjust.

Edit: I have read Thiel's book "Zero to One" twice.

Yang has gone from 0 to 1 and is going to see exponential growth as Iowa gets closer. All these articles are people who have a distorted views of reality and chalk up his support as bots in order to fit their world view. The most likely reason from my observation is bias against Asian American men in leadership positions.

Also, here's a list of books I read and recommend in 2014: http://blog.chewxy.com/books/

It's a bit cult like in that sense, but when you have a monopoly with no government regulation you can spend as much as you would like building the company with the people you like (see Peter Theil's book Zero to One where he writes about this).

I live write by a Google complex and have a number of friends who work there as engineers and we have had chats about the hiring process. Any Google engineer will tell you that whiteboarding A* is not part of his day to day. But it's just culture in the end.

The 'Zero To One' chapter on monopoly should be required reading for entrepreneurship. I guess the problem is some people will still indulge in mental gymnastics and find a way to convince themselves they have a monopoly. My favorite example is this gem from back in the day: https://i0.wp.com/25iq.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/uber-n....

Peter Thiel has a book called Zero to One that spends an entire early chapter discussing the techniques companies like (specifically) Google use in order to hold a practical monopoly while not exposing themselves to anti-monopoly regulation. In Thiel’s opinion this is deliberate, and a tactic that should be used in the readers’ own company.

> "Election integrity" presumably meaning that he wants the tech industry to control what people see about politics and politicians, lest they accidentally vote for the wrong guy.

That’s a pretty poor-faith interpretation of “election integrity” given that the companies ‘idlewords targets include companies that have spent the last few weeks testifying before Congressional committees on this very topic.

> They fired Damore for having the audacity to point out that years of bending over backwards to recruit more women had failed to make much difference because women don't study CS at the same rate - a verifiable fact that upset a bunch of fundamentalist feminists.

Ah! See, I knew you were capable of a good-faith interpretation of someone’s writing.

> ...even more Clintonite, globalist and to try and control elections is tremendously disturbing.

...

"Madame Bovary" - Gustave Flaubert - Considered to be one of the masterpieces of literature, but it's so long that I can't really recommend it.

"The Sales Acceleration Formula" - Mark Roberge - I'd recommend this to any entrepreneur.

"Status Anxiety" - Alain de Botton - A pretty good pop scienc-y psychology book.

"Zero to One" - Peter Thiel - A philosophy book imo.

"Tokyo Vice" - Jake Adelstein - A look at the underbelly of Japanese society.

"Capitalism and the Jews" - Jerry Muller - A very good overview of the intersection of the Jewish faith and culture with their business success.

"The Richest Man in Babylon" - George S. Clayson - A personal finance parable. Recommended.

"The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up" - Marie Kondo - A philosophy book. Worth a look even if you don't ascribe to its teachings.

He posits:

- Definite pessimists have a concrete negative potential future in mind and often work to subjugate it

- Indefinite pessimists have a vague "the future looks negative" and don't act on concrete plans to improve it

- Definite optimists have a concrete positive potential future in mind and often work to make it a reality

- Indefinite optimists often have a vague "everything will be fine" mindset and rely on others to make that a reality

On a general sense, I'd wager that both optimists and negatives are a good idea to have at the collective level, as both are driven by similar but different motivations. I'd say it's the definite subsets of each group that are "realistic" and "useful" as it pertains to the future, rather than either larger group as a whole.

This is a trait shared by entrepreneurs, engineers, and extremists. There's a high overlap between the three.

Social norms are powerful. People outside of them often see better ways to do things (or what they believe to be such). Constructively, they might start a business to fix the world. Destructively, they might blow up what they don't like.

That's a kind of short summary, but the book explains this much more convincingly and eloquently.

It's not a loss to the sector to lose somebody who thinks the path to doing that is intolerance, dominance, lack of accountability and an insistence on some Ayn Rand-ian gibberish philosophy of the World.

He was intolerant of Gawker. He dominated them by suing them to the hilt via the Hogan case. He is anti-regulation which in this case is a synonym for anti-accountability. Most of his political and economic philosophy seems to be the same gauche pastiche of SV's obsession with Rand. So, yeah, good riddance.

If software is eating the World, it's important the people building and operating it are as diverse as possible, otherwise there is a risk it unconsciously or consciously becomes biased in its actions and consequences towards a single social group at the expense of others.

Of course a one-party political philosophy is a problem in the long term, but so is Trump's stance on equality - one Thiel endorses - and for now at least it's important the voices of diversity and accountability win out for the long run.

TL;DR: Bye! Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out! Come back when you've got a little more mature and empathic towards others if you want!

(I am a startup CEO, w/ technical background. Learnt a LOT from this book. Would probably not be in the same job if I hadn't read this)

Other good books that will give an intro into tech startup management for laypeople:

-Zero to One (Peter Thiel)

-The hard thing about Hard things (Ben Horowitz)

If you want to start a startup I would advise you to come up with an idea and start working on your product. Learn the necessary technology as you go. You really don't need to know so much on the "business" side of things when you start.

"How to Get Startup Ideas" by PG and Start Small Stay Small really cover 90% of what you need to know when you begin.

Sorry, can't recommend any videos, I guess How to Start a Startup are the most useful ones.

"People always say you should live every day as though it's your last. I sort of have taken the opposite tack, where I think you should live every day as though it's going to go on forever. You should treat people like you're going to see them again in the future. You should start working on projects that may take a long time. And so I want to live every day as though it's going to go on forever." [0]

The one I couldn't agree with (and one that features in his book Zero to One) was about 'Competition is for loosers' I find it ironic that he brings up example of Google and the monopoly it holds over the market... but wasn't Google entering the search market as a competition to multiple other internet firms before they leap-frogged them with all the talent they gobbled up from DEC?

I like the hypothesis about how there is always more than one entity (or a person) that's trying to do invent something almost at the same time-- theory of Relativity [1], the airplane[2], the light blub [3]... and how each of them were competing against time as much as each others to be the first to achieve the breakthrough.

[0] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/218217-work-for-a-better-lif...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Histor...

I like how Thiel's counter-culture criticisms that seems to go against the crowd gets shut down by big tech and media. It is one of his techniques in his book Zero to One:
“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
https://fs.blog/2015/11/the-single-best-interview-question-y...

He might just be misunderstood: he is not making conclusions, but asking questions, posting hypotheses or conjectures for further investigation (the scientist method). He is checking against his own biases (investor in Facebook and Bitcoin)

Ex: His support for Trump happened to be a bad bet against the crowd, but he did not endorse him for a 2nd term (after seeing the data). Most Palantir attacks by the tech community are also baseless and political (covered by liberal media).

His suspicions are valid given past observations.
Who would blame him for distrusting marketing giants = brainwashing machines like Google, Apple, Facebook and by extension China? Do you see his logic? His law background might actually make him the best advocate for ethics, which big tech hides violations really well with marketing and PR.

Bitcoin may have been countercultural at the beginning, until is was not- right now it is being speculated more like a money making scheme than a promising technology. Thiel's comment might be right onto something, let's not discredit him this early. Remember, he was part of the Paypal mafia...

BTW, off topic, but this campaign is crazy. I don't like either Clinton or Trump, and have mentioned to friends and family that I will leave the presidential part of the ballot in November blank or vote for Jill Stein. It just seems wrong to me to vote for someone I simply don't like. For this honesty, I have several friends who are all over my case for 'wasting my vote.'

I really enjoyed The 48 Laws of Power and a few other titles by Greene. Some of Malcolm Gladwell's books are interesting although they are a tad popsci. Recently finished Zero to One which was good, but if you listen to Thiel often there wasn't much new material. Lords of Finance is a NYTBS that is really well done and reminiscent of Taleb so you might like that.

Thanks.

Overall, the number one most valuable skill in my opinion, and the one that I keep coming back to over the years is critical thinking. For that, I love Understanding Arguments, the Philosopher's Toolkit & Ethics Toolkit by Baggini & Fosl, and anything "legal", which sharpens your critical thinking, like Farnsworth's Legal Analyst or even Intro to American Law on Coursera. But those three books on basic reasoning will serve you well for the rest of your life as a business and technical leader.

From Scott Alexander's review of Thiel's Zero to One:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/31/book-review-zero-to-on...

Read The Four Steps To The Epiphany by @sgblank, and The Art Of The Start by Guy Kawasaki. Zero To One is a good book, but it isn't as much about the "nuts and bolts" of actually building a business. TFSTTE is very much "nuts and bolts". It is, IMO, about as close as you can get to a "paint by the numbers" guide to building a business.

There is a newer version of TFSTTE, retitled The Startup Owner's Manual. It is also good and while it is, in many ways, "just" the second edition of TFSTTE, there's enough new content that it should probably count as a separate book. I'd actually recommend reading both.

Currently reading:

"Zero to One" by Peter Thiel

"Discover Meteor: Building Real-Time JavaScript Web Apps" by Tom Coleman & Sacha Greif

Reading next:

"Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" by Walter Isaacson

Overall, I like Isaacson's writing style, and for someone with a non-scientific background, did a pretty good job at describing physical concepts such as a relativity and space-time.

It was exciting to read his bio on Steve Jobs the day it came out, but in retrospect seemed to lack depth. I'm not sure if I learned anything new about him as a person, than just someone following Apple and his career over the years.

The system rewards those under H1B. There is no provision for entrepreneurs. Being a college dropout entrepreneur, from a non-caucasian country, what chance do I have?

I am reading Peter Thiel's book Zero to One. He talks about hidden injustices in our society. This is what comes to mind.

To grow, one can either scale vertically or horizontally (paraphrased).

Now if we apply this to your situation , scaling horizontally would be learning new languages, ie. Objective-C, Javascript etc. I'm assuming you're not really about this but you want to scale vertically.

If scaling vertically is the case, then what you really want to focus on is doing something either 1) other people have not done before yet and/or 2) do something that is 10x better than what is already out there. I don't do too much C/C++ dev but maybe think about embedded, OS, GPU, etc.

If you accomplish 1) and/or 2), then you can truly master C/C++ dev. My 2 cents.

Imagine if your hiring committee had a similar platitude. Is it illegal? Arguably no. Is it going to narrow candidates down based on any criteria that actually matters to the job? Probably not. I think catching yourself when you're tempted to use these kinds of heuristics is the key. Ask yourself, "are there any direct causal links between performance and the metric I'm measuring?" If not, you might not want to use that metric to make decisions.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-hates-suits-2014-...

2) Zero to One, by Peter Thiel—Zero to one opened my eyes to several angles of business that I hadn't been thinking about. It made me think much harder about making long-term plans towards a concrete goal, even if changes must be made along the way. It also clarified my thoughts about the nature of competition and non-conformity. Courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

3. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell—While it's not a business book, this book is a deep look at mythology and psychology. I find it helpful both for understanding people and for understanding myself.

Outside of software I have:

- The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

- Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel

- Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field

- Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

One book that I have been meaning to add next to Syd Field's Screenplay is Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee.

The concept that zero to one is much more valuable than one to ten helped me understand my own career better. I have always been a risk taker and even though some of my work projects over the last 30 years have failed, my bosses never seemed unhappy with me. I would usually really nail a few new ideas a year. This book helped me to understand why I seemed to get perks (like ocean view window offices at two consequative companies) that none of the other programmers got, even though they seemed to be much steadier workers than I was.

- The Martian (http://www.amazon.com/The-Martian-Novel-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B...)

- Zero to One (http://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804...)

- The Hard Thing About Hard Things (http://www.amazon.com/The-Hard-Thing-About-Things/dp/0062273...)

CSS: The definitive guide - Eric Meyer

HTML & CSS design - Jon Ducket

Zero to One - Peter Theil. (Started reading it early this year, still on it.)

I've a self-taught developer coding professionally for 4 years now and I'm looking to fill knowledge gaps and understand how things work under the hood.