Peter Thiel is the Founder of PayPal, along with Elon Musk. Peter is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002.

In 2004, Peter Thiel made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he now sits on the board.

Peter Thiel’s former colleagues have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia” and include:

·         Elon Musk – founder/co-founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and is the Chairman of Solar City

·         Reid Hoffman – former EVP who later founded LinkedIn and was an early investor in Facebook

·         David O. Sacks – former PayPal COO who later founded Yammer (sold to Microsoft for over $1B)

·         Steve Chen – former PayPal engineer who co-founded YouTube

·         Chad Hurley – former PayPal web designer who co-founded YouTube

·         Roelof Botha  – former PayPal CFO who later became a partner of venture capital firm Sequoia Capital

·         Dave McClure – a former PayPal marketing director, a super angel investor for start up companies[23] and founder of 500 Startups which has hit 500+ investments. [24]

·         Jeremy Stoppelman – former VP of Technology at PayPal who later co-founded Yelp

·         Etc.

In September 2014, Peter Thiel published his first book Zero to One -- Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

This is not your average business book. This may be the best business book I’ve ever read, and I’ve ready MANY. I’m not the only one that feels this way:

·         "This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world."

−        Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook

·         "Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies. Zero to One shows how."

−        Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla

·         "Zero to One is the first book any working or aspiring entrepreneur must read—period."

−        Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, and venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz

·         "When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. This is a classic."

−        Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan

I purchased this book as an audiobook in iTunes the day it was published (September 2014) and was instantly hooked. My preliminary thoughts were:

·         Wow, Peter Thiel is an eccentric, but he’s brilliant. :-O

·         He’s EXTREMELY efficient with his words – book version is barely 200 pages.

·         Every section is filled with fundamental truths that I have observed over 20-years as a tech entrepreneur, even though many thoughts are quite controversial/contrarian to modern Silicon Valley.

Once I completed the audiobook for the first time, I immediately sent a gift copy via iTunes audiobook to:

http://www.abovo42.com/steink@gmail.com

http://www.abovo42.com/dblundin@vestmark.com

I then let the audiobook run over-and-over in my car for months on end – I have probably been through it 15-20 times total and I am still not bored of the content and the message.

I also proceeded to gift copies of the audiobook, kindle-version, and hardback version of Zero to One to dozens of my entrepreneur friends (the screenshot below from my Amazon orders is just the hardback version of the gifts, and doesn’t include kindle or iTunes audiobook).

I’m happy to report a year later that MANY of the principles from this book can be found in the mission, strategy, and vision of Abovo42 Corporation.

Obviously, I highly recommend this book to anyone, but entrepreneurs in particular.

I leave the readers of this Abovo42.com post with this question…

“What is something you believe that nearly no one agrees with you on?” :-)

Cheers.

SPF

p.s. I just finished the Elon Musk biography – I need to post a gushing review of Elon Musk on Abovo42 soon – Thiel refers to Musk constantly in Zero to One.

Zero to One – Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – The Challenge of the Future

“What important truth do few people agree with you on?” Answering this deceptively tricky question is the key to any future of progress—and to building a great business.

Chapter 2 – Party Like It’s 1999

The dogmas created after the dot-com crash continue to haunt us today. The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.

Chapter 3 – All Happy Companies Are Different

The most successful businesses share one key feature that enables them to innovate at unprecedented scale.

Chapter 4 – The Ideology of Competition

Competition isn’t just seen as a spur to productivity—for many, it’s a way of life. But what if it’s actually holding us back?

Chapter 5 – Last Mover Advantage

Short-term thinking ruins companies. The most important lesson an entrepreneur can learn is to think big but start small.

Chapter 6 – You Are Not a Lottery Ticket

The same question lurks behind every success: was it luck or skill? But builders aren’t backward-looking; they adopt a more definite attitude and engineer a better future.

Chapter 7 – Follow the Money

Apply it correctly, and one simple insight—almost everything is radically less equal than it appears—can change your life.

Chapter 8 – Secrets

Every one of today’s most famous and familiar ideas was once unknown and unsuspected. Lots more secrets remain undiscovered; learn to find them and see your fortune rise.

Chapter 9 – Foundations

The decisions you make today will govern what your business looks like years now. Every entrepreneur has to get a few things right from the start.

Chapter 10 – The Mechanics of Mafia

After PayPal, the “PayPal Mafia” created SpaceX, Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yammer, Palantir, and Yelp. The incredible story of that team will help you build yours.

Chapter 11 – If You Build It, Will They Come?

The best product does not always win. Great products do not sell themselves. That’s up to you, and the problem is much stranger than it seems.

Chapter 12 – Man and Machine

20 years ago, people feared cheap foreign labor; today, it’s replacement by robots. But the most successful entrepreneurs make products that help humans, not automate them away.

Chapter 13 – Seeing Green

Clean energy is a hugely important sector—and to date it’s been a huge flop, as entrepreneurs neglected to answer the seven questions that every business must get right.

Chapter 14 – The Founder’s Paradox

Founders are contradictory: revered and abhorred, powerful and weak. Just as we need founders in all their peculiarity, founders need to understand a few things to survive.

Conclusion

What will our society look like 20 years from now? 100? It’s up to us. We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we have to work to build it now.