Hello
again. After taking a bit of break from
this site, I got back to business this weekend and read a couple of books, my
thoughts on which are memorialized below.
First off is
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter
Thiel (2014). Truly one of the best
books that I have ever read. Admittedly,
my recent experience is focused on helping to get a new business launched – but
even without that backdrop, I suspect that I would still be super impressed with
this one.
For those
who don’t know, Mr. Thiel is the founder of both PayPal and Palantir, and an
early investor in Facebook, LinkedIn, and SpaceX. Therefore, he is not only someone with proven
success in starting and funding compelling new businesses, he has been able to
do it serially. He is a risk-taker, and therefore
someone worth paying attention to.
His book is
less a flight path for aspiring entrepreneurs, then important base concepts
that one needs to have in mind when trying to launch the next breakthrough
concept. To wit, if you are simply
copying others in an attempt to achieve marginal improvements or trivial
differentiating factors, you haven’t actually learned anything from the
innovators and are unlikely to survive and succeed. The moral of the story has to be figuring out
the secrets that are still out there and the important truths that most others would
disagree with you about. It is not
simply to be contrarian in the traditional sense of going against the crowd,
but instead having the courage to think for yourself. It is related to fighting the reality that
the mainstream generally views it as progress that unorthodox ideas now are
commonly dismissed out of hand. All of
that may seem obvious, but there is a certain internal fortitude required to
act on these first principles. All of
this argument goes against diversification and taking risks on the truly novel
and different. That is how the money is
made – subscribing to what is better known as the “Power Law”.
In addition,
within his discussion, Thiel offers some interesting insights on globalization,
China and monopolies. To his thinking,
globalization is simply taking what works in one place and extending it
everywhere else. In other words, copying. Therefore, the opposite of globalization is
not nationalism, but technology – that which creates new modes of
progress. So, by that logic, the strong push
for globalization as the answer probably leads to stagnation – and when you
consider developing concerns, whether it’s the environment or some other issue,
without the new thinking that comes from innovation, we face tremendous hurdles
in the future. As an offshoot of that
thinking, he views China as a growth story that is entirely premised on
globalization and copying without any innovation, again an unsustainable
approach that should cause greater skepticism about that country’s ability to
take over as the global hegemon. Finally,
the author sees the real tension in creating new technology as between
competition and monopoly. The real
innovator is the creative monopoly, which generates something entirely new with
a proprietary technology that makes the world a better place.
The other
book from the weekend is The World According to Star Wars by Cass Sunstein
(2016). A light read on how the Star
Wars arc is a compelling metaphor for life.
It provides a story of free will, the internal battle that everyone
faces between light and dark, and informs on the ideals of mercy, forgiveness
and redemption. And, most poignantly for
me, it is a story about fathers and sons.
Needless to say, as soon as I finished it, I decided to give my dad, my
hero, a call.
