Putting A Successful Business Peter Thiel - 1102 Words

Peter Thiel is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur who co-founded companies such as, Pay-Pal and Palantir. In his book Zero to One, Thiel talks about the essential steps to follow in creating a successful business. According to Thiel, in order to create a successful business the founder must create a new product that has never been done before. He talks about the horizontal and vertical process of businesses. The horizontal process focuses on the idea of doing more of what is already working. While, the vertical process focuses on a new or better way to do something. Thiel says that the vertical process is what is needed in starting a successful business. One of my favorite quotes from the book is, â€Å"Every moment in business happens†¦show more content†¦If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.† This backtracks on the idea of the horizontal and vertical process; it is so vital that companies come up with new and upda ted ideas to in order to accomplish success. Another important idea that I took away from Peter Thiel’s book, Zero to One, was the idea that, in order to think clearly about the future one must question the past, Thiel focuses on this in chapter two. Business owners must learn from their past mistakes in order to create a business that has a strong foundation. Thiel goes into great detail about how important it is to learn lessons from previous mistakes and take one step at a time while building your business. In Chapter three and four, Thiel goes into vast detail about monopoly’s and non-monopoly’s, the two simple models in business. According to Thiel, every company that has a monopoly is so successful that no other company can compare to it. Non-monopoly’s generally, â€Å"exaggerate their decision by defining their market as the intersection of various smaller markets† (Thiel 29). Monopolies are idealistic for a company in a competitive marke t compared to competition in the business world, which can trap a business and makes them less successful. When explaining this, Thiel compares both Shakespeare and Carl Marx. He states that Shakespeare’s explanation that people who fight are commonly similar to each other is more similar to the business