Summary: Zero to One

Growth is easy to measure, but durability isn't. Those who succumb to measurement mania obsess about weekly active user statistics, monthly revenue targets, and quarterly earnings reports. However, you can hit those numbers and still overlook deeper, harder-to-measure problems that threaten the future viability of your business. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won't tell you the answer."

you can recognize competition as a destructive force instead of a sign of value, you're already more sane than most.

Competition is a concept which pervades society. The world is obsessed with it and everyone lauds its benefits. The only problem is once you start enacting its commandments, you end up getting trapped.

Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.

It's clear even governments understand this dynamic. That's why one of its departments works hard to create monopolies (by granting patents to new inventions) while another department hunts monopolies down (by prosecuting antitrust cases).

the history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents. Monopolies drive progress because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate."

Monopolists, by contrast, can afford to think about other things.

real goal of any startup is to build a successful company which becomes a monopoly by solving a unique problem for customers. You have to figure out how to rise above your competitors.

Sales matters just as much as product.

Most people and many companies assume globalization will be the main driver of the future of the world but that's incorrect. Technology matters more. The key challenge of the future is to develop new technology which will help everyone do more with less. Globalization without this kind of new technology is unsustainable.