作者：Peter Thiel / Blake Masters
來(lái)源：微盤(pán)下載的電子書(shū)導(dǎo)入Kindle
發(fā)行時(shí)間：2014年9月16日

《zero to one》這段時(shí)間被各種渠道推薦了好多次，所以很認(rèn)真的開(kāi)始讀，讀到一半的時(shí)候得知中信出版社剛譯制完成了中文版：《從0到1：開(kāi)啟商業(yè)與未來(lái)的秘密》，不過(guò)確實(shí)是好書(shū)，這次中文版出版之快，可見(jiàn)互聯(lián)網(wǎng)人對(duì)知識(shí)產(chǎn)權(quán)方面的理解，是有異于傳統(tǒng)行業(yè)的，書(shū)的主干整理自Peter的課程筆記，所以相對(duì)簡(jiǎn)略易讀，觀點(diǎn)清晰，圍繞觀點(diǎn)闡述，像TED的15分鐘視頻一樣的高效

Peter在書(shū)里面提到的很多東西讓我驚異，比如對(duì)于羅爾斯和諾齊克對(duì)立的分析，顯然Peter是一位自由主義背景的新保守主義者，網(wǎng)上說(shuō)他還是一位同性戀基督徒，在哲學(xué)、歷史、經(jīng)濟(jì)、人類(lèi)學(xué)和文學(xué)方面涉獵廣泛，比如說(shuō)他對(duì)于中國(guó)人是絕對(duì)的悲觀主義者的定義，比如他提出的創(chuàng)新型壟斷的必須性等等，都給我很多延展閱讀的啟發(fā)

在書(shū)中提到兩個(gè)不錯(cuò)的面試問(wèn)題：“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” “what valuable company is nobody building?”，可以用來(lái)判斷人的獨(dú)立思考性和合作精神，確實(shí)是有深度的，需要有一定的積淀的人才可以回到好這兩個(gè)問(wèn)題

股價(jià)、油價(jià)、匯率等等，都是在人的“期望”這個(gè)判定調(diào)節(jié)下的市場(chǎng)行為，一家好的公司亦然，好的公司經(jīng)營(yíng)和管理者，需要有能力給所有人一個(gè)好的發(fā)展預(yù)期，正式這樣的預(yù)期，很大的程度上推進(jìn)著公司的加速度發(fā)展，好的公司文化就應(yīng)當(dāng)是可以產(chǎn)生那種正向預(yù)期的文化

好的互聯(lián)網(wǎng)公司有一個(gè)共同的特點(diǎn)，就是產(chǎn)品搞的很強(qiáng)，而非互聯(lián)網(wǎng)行業(yè)的很多公司也有一個(gè)共同的特點(diǎn)老板搞的很強(qiáng)，產(chǎn)品是有別于品牌的另一個(gè)公司形象特征，離客戶(hù)更近的一個(gè)環(huán)節(jié)，漏斗的中間層，讓公司和客戶(hù)結(jié)合的更加緊密

作者對(duì)于樂(lè)觀主義悲觀主義，明確的和不明確的四象限劃分：

明確的：表示有明確的對(duì)于未來(lái)社會(huì)形態(tài)的主張，不明確的：表示未來(lái)社會(huì)的發(fā)展形態(tài)不可預(yù)計(jì)（自由主義觀點(diǎn)）

明確的樂(lè)觀主義者：Hegel、Marx
明確的悲觀主義者：Plato、Aristotle
不明確的樂(lè)觀主義者：Nozick、Rawls
不明確的悲觀主義者：Epicurus、Lucretius

顯然作者認(rèn)為中國(guó)和當(dāng)代的美國(guó)的差距是很大的，現(xiàn)在中國(guó)社會(huì)我的感覺(jué)在往更加樂(lè)觀和有確定未來(lái)的發(fā)展方向發(fā)展，是中國(guó)意識(shí)形態(tài)的回歸和自由主義經(jīng)濟(jì)制度的遠(yuǎn)離

作者花了一定的篇幅抨擊大型機(jī)構(gòu)的低效和政府機(jī)構(gòu)的官僚，這也是美國(guó)常春藤院校的傳統(tǒng)，讓我萌生了一個(gè)“公務(wù)員點(diǎn)評(píng)”系統(tǒng)的構(gòu)想，作者在在闡述費(fèi)馬大定理的時(shí)候我自己寫(xiě)了小程序來(lái)判斷哥德巴赫猜想里面的素?cái)?shù)組成問(wèn)題，順路研究了一下實(shí)無(wú)限和潛無(wú)限，扯遠(yuǎn)了

第二次用Kindle讀原著，確實(shí)翻譯查詢(xún)非常的方便，對(duì)于我這樣的多線程學(xué)習(xí)中，幫助巨大，好的工具對(duì)于工作和學(xué)習(xí)幫助非常大，尤其是作者本身知識(shí)領(lǐng)域不同或者知識(shí)面廣泛的時(shí)候，更是如此，未來(lái)文章的撰寫(xiě)和論壇的撰寫(xiě)，幻想也是可以有摘引的自動(dòng)生成平臺(tái)，實(shí)現(xiàn)文章和論壇的“互聯(lián)網(wǎng)化”

摘錄：

My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India’s hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do—using only today’s tools—the result would be environmentally catastrophic. Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today:

1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward.

2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “l(fā)ean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.

3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.

4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

These lessons have become dogma in the startup world; those who would ignore them are presumed to invite the justified doom visited upon technology in the great crash of 2000. And yet the opposite principles are probably more correct:

1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality.
2. A bad plan is better than no plan.
3. Competitive markets destroy profits.
4. Sales matters just as much as product.

As with all good tragedy, the conflict seems inevitable only in retrospect. In fact it was entirely avoidable. These families came from very different places. The House of Montague built operating systems and office applications. The House of Capulet wrote a search engine. What was there to fight about? Lots, apparently. As a startup, each clan had been content to leave the other alone and prosper independently. But as they grew, they began to focus on each other. Montagues obsessed about Capulets obsessed about Montagues. The result? Windows vs. Chrome OS, Bing vs. Google Search, Explorer vs. Chrome, Office vs. Docs, and Surface vs. Nexus. Just as war cost the Montagues and Capulets their children, it cost Microsoft and Google their dominance: Apple came along and overtook them all. In January 2013, Apple’s market capitalization was $500 billion, while Google and Microsoft combined were worth $467 billion. Just three years before, Microsoft and Google were each more valuable than Apple. War is costly business.

Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win. There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly. This advice can be hard to follow because pride and honor can get in the way.

What does a company with large cash flows far into the future look like? Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding. This isn’t a list of boxes to check as you build your business—there’s no shortcut to monopoly. However, analyzing your business according to these characteristics can help you think about how to make it durable.

The philosophy of the ancient world was pessimistic: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Lucretius all accepted strict limits on human potential. The only question was how best to cope with our tragic fate. Modern philosophers have been mostly optimistic. From Herbert Spencer on the right and Hegel in the center to Marx on the left, the 19th century shared a belief in progress. (Remember Marx and Engels’s encomium to the technological triumphs of capitalism from this page.) These thinkers expected material advances to fundamentally change human life for the better: they were definite optimists.

In the late 20th century, indefinite philosophies came to the fore. The two dominant political thinkers, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, are usually seen as stark opposites: on the egalitarian left, Rawls was concerned with questions of fairness and distribution; on the libertarian right, Nozick focused on maximizing individual freedom. They both believed that people could get along with each other peacefully, so unlike the ancients, they were optimistic. But unlike Spencer or Marx, Rawls and Nozick were indefinite optimists: they didn’t have any specific vision of the future.

But the most important lesson to learn from Jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics. The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively. Forget “minimum viable products”—ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.

The power law is not just important to investors; rather, it’s important to everybody because everybody is an investor. An entrepreneur makes a major investment just by spending her time working on a startup. Therefore every entrepreneur must think about whether her company is going to succeed and become valuable. Every individual is unavoidably an investor, too. When you choose a career, you act on your belief that the kind of work you do will be valuable decades from now.

The most common answer to the question of future value is a diversified portfolio: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” everyone has been told. As we said, even the best venture investors have a portfolio, but investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible. The kind of portfolio thinking embraced by both folk wisdom and financial convention, by contrast, regards diversified betting as a source of strength. The more you dabble, the more you are supposed to have hedged against the uncertainty of the future.

But life is not a portfolio: not for a startup founder, and not for any individual. An entrepreneur cannot “diversify” herself: you cannot run dozens of companies at the same time and then hope that one of them works out well. Less obvious but just as important, an individual cannot diversify his own life by keeping dozens of equally possible careers in ready reserve.

Our schools teach the opposite: institutionalized education traffics in a kind of homogenized, generic knowledge. Everybody who passes through the American school system learns not to think in power law terms. Every high school course period lasts 45 minutes whatever the subject. Every student proceeds at a similar pace. At college, model students obsessively hedge their futures by assembling a suite of exotic and minor skills. Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

Along with the natural fact that physical frontiers have receded, four social trends have conspired to root out belief in secrets. First is incrementalism. From an early age, we are taught that the right way to do things is to proceed one very small step at a time, day by day, grade by grade. If you overachieve and end up learning something that’s not on the test, you won’t receive credit for it. But in exchange for doing exactly what’s asked of you (and for doing it just a bit better than your peers), you’ll get an A. This process extends all the way up through the tenure track, which is why academics usually chase large numbers of trivial publications instead of new frontiers.

Second is risk aversion. People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. By definition, a secret hasn’t been vetted by the mainstream. If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.

Third is complacency. Social elites have the most freedom and ability to explore new thinking, but they seem to believe in secrets the least. Why search for a new secret if you can comfortably collect rents on everything that has already been done? Every fall, the deans at top law schools and business schools welcome the incoming class with the same implicit message: “You got into this elite institution. Your worries are over. You’re set for life.” But that’s probably the kind of thing that’s true only if you don’t believe it.

Fourth is “flatness.” As globalization advances, people perceive the world as one homogeneous, highly competitive marketplace: the world is “flat.” Given that assumption, anyone who might have had the ambition to look for a secret will first ask himself: if it were possible to discover something new, wouldn’t someone from the faceless global talent pool of smarter and more creative people have found it already? This voice of doubt can dissuade people from even starting to look for secrets in a world that seems too big a place for any individual to contribute something unique.

To anticipate likely sources of misalignment in any company, it’s useful to distinguish between three concepts: ? Ownership:

who legally owns a company’s equity?
Possession: who actually runs the company on a day-to-day basis?
Control: who formally governs the company’s affairs?

Of course, it doesn’t work like that. We the people may “own” the DMV’s resources, but that ownership is merely fictional. The clerks and petty tyrants who operate the DMV, however, enjoy very real possession of their small-time powers. Even the governor and the legislature charged with nominal control over the DMV can’t change anything. The bureaucracy lurches ever sideways of its own inertia no matter what actions elected officials take. Accountable to nobody, the DMV is misaligned with everybody. Bureaucrats can make your licensing experience pleasurable or nightmarish at their sole discretion. You can try to bring up political theory and remind them that you are the boss, but that’s unlikely to get you better service.

In the boardroom, less is more. The smaller the board, the easier it is for the directors to communicate, to reach consensus, and to exercise effective oversight. However, that very effectiveness means that a small board can forcefully oppose management in any conflict. This is why it’s crucial to choose wisely: every single member of your board matters. Even one problem director will cause you pain, and may even jeopardize your company’s future.

A board of three is ideal. Your board should never exceed five people, unless your company is publicly held. (Government regulations effectively mandate that public companies have larger boards—the average is nine members.) By far the worst you can do is to make your board extra large. When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization. If you want that kind of free rein from your board, blow it up to giant size. If you want an effective board, keep it small.

For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated. Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO—that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups. In no case should a CEO of an early-stage, venture-backed startup receive more than $150,000 per year in salary. It doesn’t matter if he got used to making much more than that at Google or if he has a large mortgage and hefty private school tuition bills. If a CEO collects $300,000 per year, he risks becoming more like a politician than a founder. High pay incentivizes him to defend the status quo along with his salary, not to work with everyone else to surface problems and fix them aggressively. A cash-poor executive, by contrast, will focus on increasing the value of the company as a whole.

Low CEO pay also sets the standard for everyone else. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, was always careful to pay himself less than everyone else in the company—four years after he started Box, he was still living two blocks away from HQ in a one-bedroom apartment with no furniture except a mattress. Every employee noticed his obvious commitment to the company’s mission and emulated it. If a CEO doesn’t set an example by taking the lowest salary in the company, he can do the same thing by drawing the highest salary. So long as that figure is still modest, it sets an effective ceiling on cash compensation.

Cash is attractive. It offers pure optionality: once you get your paycheck, you can do anything you want with it. However, high cash compensation teaches workers to claim value from the company as it already exists instead of investing their time to create new value in the future. A cash bonus is slightly better than a cash salary—at least it’s contingent on a job well done. But even so-called incentive pay encourages short-term thinking and value grabbing. Any kind of cash is more about the present than the future.

From the start, I wanted PayPal to be tightly knit instead of transactional. I thought stronger relationships would make us not just happier and better at work but also more successful in our careers even beyond PayPal. So we set out to hire people who would actually enjoy working together. They had to be talented, but even more than that they had to be excited about working specifically with us. That was the start of the PayPal Mafia.

Talented people don’t need to work for you; they have plenty of options. You should ask yourself a more pointed version of the question: Why would someone join your company as its 20th engineer when she could go work at Google for more money and more prestige?

Here are some bad answers: “Your stock options will be worth more here than elsewhere.” “You’ll get to work with the smartest people in the world.” “You can help solve the world’s most challenging problems.” What’s wrong with valuable stock, smart people, or pressing problems? Nothing—but every company makes these same claims, so they won’t help you stand out. General and undifferentiated pitches don’t say anything about why a recruit should join your company instead of many others.

The only good answers are specific to your company, so you won’t find them in this book. But there are two general kinds of good answers: answers about your mission and answers about your team. 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. At PayPal, if you were excited by the idea of creating a new digital currency to replace the U.S. dollar, we wanted to talk to you; if not, you weren’t the right fit.

The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.

In between personal sales (salespeople obviously required) and traditional advertising (no salespeople required) there is a dead zone. Suppose you create a software service that helps convenience store owners track their inventory and manage ordering. For a product priced around $1,000, there might be no good distribution channel to reach the small businesses that might buy it. Even if you have a clear value proposition, how do you get people to hear it? Advertising would either be too broad (there’s no TV channel that only convenience store owners watch) or too inefficient (on its own, an ad in Convenience Store News probably won’t convince any owner to part with $1,000 a year). The product needs a personal sales effort, but at that price point, you simply don’t have the resources to send an actual person to talk to every prospective customer. This is why so many small and medium-sized businesses don’t use tools that bigger firms take for granted. It’s not that small business proprietors are unusually backward or that good tools don’t exist: distribution is the hidden bottleneck.

This kind of man-machine symbiosis enabled PayPal to stay in business, which in turn enabled hundreds of thousands of small businesses to accept the payments they needed to thrive on the internet. None of it would have been possible without the man-machine solution—even though most people would never see it or even hear about it.

I continued to think about this after we sold PayPal in 2002: if humans and computers together could achieve dramatically better results than either could attain alone, what other valuable businesses could be built on this core principle? The next year, I pitched Alex Karp, an old Stanford classmate, and Stephen Cohen, a software engineer, on a new startup idea: we would use the human-computer hybrid approach from PayPal’s security system to identify terrorist networks and financial fraud. We already knew the FBI was interested, and in 2004 we founded Palantir, a software company that helps people extract insight from divergent sources of information. The company is on track to book sales of $1 billion in 2014, and Forbes has called Palantir’s software the “killer app” for its rumored role in helping the government locate Osama bin Laden.

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 a way to not just create but deliver your product?

6. The Durability Question
Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?

7. The Secret Question
Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?

延展閱讀：

《全面認(rèn)識(shí)Peter Thiel，這個(gè)“明確的樂(lè)觀主義者”》
http://www.36kr.com/p/215923.html

《Zero to One》的一些讀書(shū)筆記：
http://book.douban.com/review/7163738/