Number of words: 263 The second factor that thwarted American’s potential for utopia was that Pasteur’s germ theory of diseases unfortunately influenced our medical community to drop the pursuit of diseases prevention. Beginning in the 19th Century, chemicals with drugs actions were isolated from plants, and increasingly drugs were made by chemical synthesis. Our medical … Read more
Number of words: 209 Though incompatible, the global economy and total war are both children of this century. The strategic goal in traditional warfare, in Clausewitz’s famous phrase, was “to destroy the enemy’s fighting forces.” War was to be waged against the enemy’s soldiers. It was not supposed to be waged against enemy civilians and … Read more
Number of words: 427 At the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico city A 21 year old American named Dick Fosbury shocked the judge and 80,000 spectators at a session of track and field, by winning a gold medal and setting a new Olympic record with a new jumping technique. This technique revolutionized the high jump and … Read more
Number of words: 1166 Most people act as if there were no secrets left to find. An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at … Read more
Number of words: 506 The power law is not just important to investors; rather, it’s important to everybody because everybody is an investor. An entrepreneur makes a major investment just by spending her time working on a startup. Therefore every entrepreneur must think about whether her company is going to succeed and become valuable. Every … Read more
Number of words: 164 Our results at Founders Fund illustrate this skewed pattern: Facebook, the best investment in our 2005 fund, returned more than all the others combined. Palantir, the second-best investment, is set to return more than the sum of every other investment aside from Facebook. This highly uneven pattern is not unusual: we … Read more
Number of words: 81 The overwhelming importance of future profits is counterintuitive even in Silicon Valley. For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. Those who succumb to measurement mania obsess about … Read more
Number of words: 67 Just as war cost the Montagues and Capulets their children, it cost Microsoft and Google their dominance: Apple came along and overtook them all. In January 2013, Apple’s market capitalization was $500 billion, while Google and Microsoft combined were worth $467 billion. Just three years before, Microsoft and Google were each … Read more
Number of words: 350 The airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone. Economists use two simplified models to explain the difference: perfect competition and monopoly. “Perfect competition” is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand. Every … Read more
Number of words: 47 A startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. Excerpted from ‘Zero to One’ by Peter Thiel
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