Just as the legal attack on Microsoft was ending Bill Gates's dominance, Steve Jobs's return to Apple… — Peter Thiel
Just as the legal attack on Microsoft was ending Bill Gates's dominance, Steve Jobs's return to Apple demonstrated the irreplaceable value of a company's founder. In some ways, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were opposites. Jobs was an artist, preferred closed systems, and spent his time thinking about great products above all else; Gates was a businessman, kept his products open, and wanted to run the world. But both were insider/outsiders, and both pushed the companies they started to achievements that nobody else would have been able to match.
p. 187Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them.
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Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, American companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today. What happens when we've gained everything to be had from fine-tuning the old lines of businesses that we've inherited? Unlikely as it sounds, the answer threatens to be far worse than the crisis of 2008. Today's "best practices" lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.
p. 1
Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything I've learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. But while I have noticed many patterns, and I relate them here, this book offers no formula for success. 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 be innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places ...
p. 2
... the phenomenon of serial entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of chance.
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