https://summaryshelf.app/authors/peter-thiel-and-blake-masters/Recent content in Peter Thiel and Blake Masters on SummaryShelfHugoen-usWed, 22 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://summaryshelf.app/zero-to-one/Sun, 05 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://summaryshelf.app/zero-to-one/<p>The most valuable companies aren&rsquo;t built by copying what already works. Peter Thiel draws a hard line between two kinds of progress: horizontal progress, going from one to n by spreading existing ideas, and vertical progress, going from zero to one by making something that never existed before. Manufacturing more smartphones is horizontal. Inventing the smartphone is vertical. The first is easy to picture and easy to copy; the second is hard precisely because you have to see what almost no one else can. Real value, Thiel argues, comes from that second kind — and the reward for it is monopoly.</p>