Zero to One

I've just finished Peter Thiel's Zero to One and it is a great bible for startups and entrepreneurs. I've found there some very important tips as well as important words of reassurance. Below are my highlights, I think you find them encouraging to read this book.

• When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work—going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.
  
• A startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
  
• Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.
  
• Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.
  
• You can also make a 10x improvement through superior integrated design.
  
• What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.
  
• Forget “minimum viable products”—ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.
  
• It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
  
• If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it.
  
• A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.
  
• He who is not busy being born is busy dying.
  
• You might even extend its [the company's] founding indefinitely.
  
• Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business — the creation of new value — cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.