The land of rational decision making. Book#54

I first learned about Peter Thiel in a Charlie Rose interview when this book Zero to One was published in early 2015. I added it to my reading list then and really wanted to get to it when my friend Mark S. whom I met at conference in the US told me about his quote on monopolies. It was something along these lines: real monopolistic businesses are not those who claim they are, but those who protest they are not. Think about Google once more lol. I really enjoyed the book. This isn’t only a book about entrepreneurship, it is after all a great book about rational decision making.

Here are extracts of my notes on start ups when I read it in Oct 2015:

1. start small and lean
2. focus on one step at a time otherwise the task will seem insurmountable
3. remain flexible, trial and error works
4. focus on products not sales, build something that will sell itself, because the only sustainable growth is viral growth, so be obsessed to improve the product or service experience
5. Ignore competition, do your own stuff the way you see it, don’t comform.
6. Choose the right co-founders, no part time involvement, no remote location, the CEO should have no or the lowest salary and the earliest employees take the most equity, each employee must do one thing, no overlap
7. find 100 target customers who love you and focus only on them

I was surprised to see so many of the Buffett and Munger mantra, but after all they are all coming from the same land of rational decision making, i.e. :

• They like to concentrate on scalable businesses, focus and bet big
• They think that the most valuable businesses are the essentiality’s of our world

My main takeaways on personal attitude, are as follows:

1. be a definite optimist:“believe that the future will be better if you plan it”
2. have 3 categories of goals, the easy, the hard and the impossible so that you feel satisfied with achieving some of them and never run out of things to explore.

There is a lot here about investing and not just tech. Great book.

Peter Thiel - Charlie Rose

My purpose in life is independence, fulfilment and a better understanding of how the world works. Like Charlie Munger, I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. And like Sir Isaac Newton, I believe in our ability to see further than any others before us by acknowledging that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. With this blog I hope to keep track of my learning about investing, business, decision making, entrepreneurship and self development while inspiring others to do the same. For the moment the format of this blog will be one post for each book that has influenced me, but I expect it to evolve over time. Join my Journey. John.