Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

In January 2013, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, tweeted to his 2 million followers: “Success is never accidental.”

From the outside, everyone in your company should be different in the same way.

Non-monopolists exaggerate their distinction by defining their market as the intersection of various smaller markets:

1. The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have

WHENEVER I INTERVIEW someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

But what makes the future distinctive and important isn’t that it hasn’t happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today.

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.

You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done. That’s the only thing that can make its importance unique.

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”