Peter Thiel, billionaire venture capitalist and founder of PayPal and Palantir, offers helpful advice to young entrepreneurs in his recent book “Zero to One”.
“A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the tyranny of Chance: you are not a lottery ticket.”
Never one to shy away from controversy, Thiel offers several unique perspectives on entrepreneurship:
- Entrepreneurs are the ones who “create the future” by being the ones to “discover the secrets” that haven’t yet been told and by unlocking the change that the world needs.
- The most successful startups find a small, niche market to dominate and are less focused on “disrupting” existing players. Once you dominate a small market, you move to adjacent markets.
- A startup’s greatest strength is in “new thinking”, which is afforded by their small size and lack of existing dogmas and customers to service
- The best way to identify a promising new business idea is to identify “secrets” about how the would should be, and then make them a reality. Thiel identifies Uber and AirBnB as two companies which took relatively mature industries and unlocked “secrets” to dramatically improve them.
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