It is not without its risks, because there is no cover from the crowd, and because it frequently leads to conclusions with which no one else agrees.” Bruce Gibney. “What does it mean to be contrarian? It does not mean simply doing the opposite of what the majority does - that’s just consensus thinking by a different guise … The most contrarian thing to do is to think independently. Employees are more likely to pursue behaviours in the interest of career advancement over long-term company needs. And incentives to preserve the status quo are ever-present. Indeed, it’s often difficult to try new things at large organisations. While they’re small and nimble enough to try something different, they’re not so small as to not get anything done. Thiel says that start-ups are better placed to solve zero-to-one problems. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.” Peter Thiel and Blake Masters. “The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative. If the problem was obvious, we’d have solved it already. It’s easier for people to improve upon the lightbulb than to invent it. Unsurprisingly, vertical progress is more challenging and less predictable. Vertical progress, by contrast, is the journey from zero to one. When something is in strong demand, producers around the world may try to meet such needs. This involves copying or replicating good ideas. Horizontal progress is the transition from “one to many”.

When thinking about innovation, Thiel likes to distinguish between horizontal progress and vertical progress. While we cannot predict the future with certainty, we can probably assume two things about it: (1) “It’s going to be different” and (2) “It must be rooted in today’s world”. Skip aheadīefore we can find or build great companies, we have to understand how progress and innovation works. From vertical progress to contrarian questions, this post shares the big lessons that I took from his book - some of which, I think, are worth incorporating into one’s entrepreneur or investor’s toolkit. Thiel expands on this very challenge in his excellent book Zero to One. You have to see a truth or secret that nobody else has yet.

Good engineering, timing, distribution and people are rarely enough. How do we find, build and scale great companies for the future? As PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel tells it, there’s “no formula for success”. Vertical progress, contrarian questions and start-up notes

Peter thiel zero to one