Are you looking for a business book for a startup? Zero to One, favourite of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, could be the best for you.
“Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how,” says CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk.
It’s a 2014 book by the American entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel co-written with Blake Masters. It is a condensed and updated version of a highly popular set of online notes taken by Masters for the CS183 class on startups, as taught by Thiel at Stanford Universityin Spring 2012.
In the Atlantic, Derek Thomson describes Thiel’s book as possibly the best business book he has ever read. In his review article, he wrote: “Peter Thiel’s new book, Zero to One, shines like a laser beam. Yes, this is a self-help book for entrepreneurs, bursting with bromides and sunny confidence about the future that only startups can build. But much more than that, it’s also a lucid and profound articulation of capitalism and success in the 21st century economy” and “it’s surprising in a wonderful way just how simple Zero to One feels. Barely 200 pages long, and well lit by clear prose and pithy aphorisms, Thiel has written a perfectly tweetable treatise and a relentlessly thought-provoking handbook”.
Mark Zuckerberg says, “this book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.”
Also a favourite of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. He says, “when a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic.”