casual thoughts on books I’m reading of an indeterminate frequency — or, what’s up with this?
I love books.
Yes, I’m into all that shit about how old ones smell great. I like tangible things, being able to flip pages and feel my progress as I do so. The ability to use an actual pen to underline compelling passages and jot down margin notes engages me so much more than reading words on a screen and constantly selecting text with my cursor.
But the thing I love most about books is their physicality.
Unlike my Instapaper queue, where I save links with the best of intentions but which nonetheless ends up being relegated to a glorified link garage, books are not so easy to forget. They persist. They sit on your bookshelf, on your nightstand, on your table. They continue to endure the neglect, staring you down, a constant visual reminder that their function is to be read, not to collect dust.
Anyways despite all this lofty talk, I haven’t been reading that much. I mean, I could miss a tweet. Or a gram. Or a facebook like. There’s probably an email I could respond to. Actually someone probably posted some interesting stuff on slack. Well, that’s taken care of — oo! A new episode of Scandal just came out so guess I’ll pick up my book after that. Oh wait did I just get another fav on my tweet?
So it goes. What to do?
My boyfriend and I set a new rule — no TV during the week (minus basketball games because he made me a sports fan and well, it’s playoffs). I’m also going to leave my phone outside of the bedroom, in a desperate ploy to avoid the twitter-facebook-instagram-slack productivity death spiral.
And I’m going to borrow some lessons from grade school and write up some book reviews for things I read. I’ve found I’m more motivated if there’s a clear output, and writing is another one of those “if only I had time” goals. Bullshit — I have to make time.
I’m writing to try to hold myself accountable and because it helps me synthesize shit better anyways. ok enough set up.
#1
Zero to One
Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Author Peter Thiel with Blake Masters
Publisher Crown Business
Copyright 2014
Buy this book
My weekend read was Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, a book about how to build breakthrough companies and create value in the world.
Thiel’s thesis (say that 10 times fast) revolves around the idea that it’s much harder to create vertical progress, to invent completely new products or experiences than it is to merely make incremental improvements. The former is “technology,” Thiel argues, going from zero to one; the latter is less impressive because we’re adding more of something familiar, doing what’s already been done.
Thiel expands on this theme through business lessons about the economics of monopoly and competition, the factor that a startup’s team plays in its potential for success, and the role of founders themselves.
reading notes —
- focus on doing one thing and owning that (preferable to “many-sided mediocrity and calling it ‘well-roundedness’”)
- forgo notions of conventional success
- don’t get caught up in competing and lose sight of what matters. competition is a destructive force, not a sign of value
- great businesses are defined by their ability to generate cash flows in the future
- monopoly is the condition of every successful business. a few characteristics of monopolies include: proprietary tech, network effects, economies of scale, branding
- content ecosystems can drive great network effects
- it’s much easier to reach a few thousand people who really need your product than to try and compete for the attention of millions of scattered individuals
- remember the power law: small minorities often achieve disproportionate results
Overall, I found some good business lessons and abstract nuggets for reaching success in this book — but found Thiel’s overuse of stereotypes off-putting (he defaults to terms like “nerd” and “geek” too frequently for my taste). He seems to place extraordinary value on appearances, as exemplified by this “blanket rule” of the Founders Fund:
“This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear t-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket rule: pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings.”
While I’m not arguing against certain cases which would prove this thinking true, I guess I’m still deluded about books and their covers or something.
I also struggled to reconcile his emphasis on building a “tribe of like-minded people” with my personal value on diversity. Here’s his description of the PayPal Mafia:
“The early PayPal team worked well together because we were all the same kind of nerd. We all loved science fiction: Cryptonomicon was required reading, and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek.”
Diversity and like-mindedness are not necessarily at odds, diverse groups can be united in thought and devoted to a single mission. Thiel does go on to say:
“… it didn’t matter what people looked like or which country they came from, but we needed every new hire to be equally obsessed.”
But I’m just not sold on the accessibility of the environment described, nor its ability to attract much beyond the white male demographic.
Critiques aside, I ended up putting down this book with a distinct drive to push myself beyond mere incrementalism, even though many of the lessons and takeaways were too abstract to be directly actionable.
grade— 8/10
