50 pages • 1 hour read
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
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Key Figures
Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel enjoys a uniquely newsworthy life: He’s made billions founding famous tech companies, supports controversial political causes, helped sue a media company into bankruptcy, and wrote Zero to One, an economics guidebook that shook up the tech industry.
Born in Germany in 1967, Thiel as a toddler moved with his family to the US. As a teen, he was state math champion and a nationally ranked chess player. He earned a bachelor’s degree and law degree at Stanford University, where he founded The Stanford Review, a right-leaning student paper that he still supports. Thiel taught a Stanford class in business startups that became the basis for Zero to One.
He worked on Wall Street, clerked for a federal judge, and began his startup career by helping launch online payments-processor giant PayPal. He later founded Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company that has controversially worked with the US government in the fields of surveillance and terrorism. He also started a venture capital firm, Founders Fund. A fan of science fiction and the fantasy novels of JRR Tolkien, Thiel has named several of his companies after features in the Lord of the Rings books.
After being outed as gay in 2007 by the online celebrity gossip site Gawker, Thiel backed Hulk Hogan’s suit against that company when it published a private sex video of Hogan. The wrestler won a large settlement that contributed to Gawker Media’s financial collapse.
Thiel is actively involved in right-wing politics. A libertarian earlier in his life, Thiel later leaned toward nationalist conservatism, and he supports Donald Trump and related candidates. He addressed the Republican National Convention in 2016, where he declared himself a proud member of the gay community. Thiel openly supports fiscally conservative gay and lesbian causes, the right to privacy, and the right of journalists worldwide to be free of arrest and murder by repressive regimes.
Blake Masters
Blake Masters took notes on a business class taught by Peter Thiel and posted them to a popular online tech site. He and Thiel used the notes as the basis for the book Zero to One. For a time, Masters managed Thiel Capital and the Thiel Foundation. In 2022, Masters became the Republican nominee for a US Senate seat in Arizona. Like Thiel, Masters supports Donald Trump and believes that high technology, rather than high-competition globalization, will advance America’s economy.
René Girard
Looming in the background of Zero to One is the late French philosopher René Girard, an expert in several fields who taught at Stanford and affected Thiel. Girard developed “mimetic theory,” which states that people learn by copying, come to envy what other people have, and end up fighting over those resources. Girard praised competition when it leads to innovation but not when competitors focus simply on defeating each other. He also developed the idea of the “scapegoat,” a prominent person who is blamed for social conflict and killed, either literally or symbolically, to absolve a society for its wrongdoings.
A devout Catholic, Girard developed mimetic theory as a perspective on Christianity—he believed Jesus gave himself up as a universal scapegoat to cleanse humanity of its competitive selfishness—but mimetic theory is applied to secular fields as well. Thiel stresses the problems of business competition, along with the danger to company leaders who find themselves in the crosshairs of an angry public, as risks to be avoided. Girard does not appear by name in Zero to One, but his ideas about imitation and competition influence Thiel’s business and economic philosophies.
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