
Key Takeaways from Zero to One - Jakkaps
https://jakkaps.com/key-takeaways-from-zero-to-one-by-peter-thiel/
======
mrfredward
One of my favorite points in the book is the explanation for why any sort of
niche small business software sucks.

In consumer software, customer acquisition cost is low and development costs
can be spread over millions of people, so there is a big profit potential even
though the price is low. For large enterprises, the customer acquisition cost
is high (lots of meetings with suits), but the payout is high (millions of
dollars is good value for software that is going to be deployed at 20,000
locations and serve millions of customers). For a small business, customer
acquisition is still expensive (sales and support done personally), but the
price is still pretty low.

The book cured me of mumbling "I could make software better than that in a
week" every time I saw a receptionist at a small office struggling with a bad
app.

~~~
stcredzero
_The book cured me of mumbling "I could make software better than that in a
week" every time I saw a receptionist at a small office struggling with a bad
app._

What if the acquisition cost could be made low? Doesn't patio11's appointment
reminder app fall into this category?

[https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-i-grew-my-
appoint...](https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-i-grew-my-appointment-
reminder-business-to-12k-mo-2b8720ca25)

~~~
rpeden
It might. He talks about revenue but not about profit. So we dpn't really know
much about his costs, aside from him mentioning that he was spending a
meaningful amount on insurance.

It could very well be that acquisition cost was quite reasonable, and he may
have talked about this elsewhere. I just don't think the IH interview tells us
enough to know for sure one way or the other.

~~~
simonswords82
He's published a huge amount of detail about revenue and costs, his profits
aren't enough to sustain a family.

I say that with the greatest amount of respect for the man by the way, he's
super super smart and I love his writing.

------
jeffdavis
The point of lean startups isn't so that _your_ startup finds the global
maximum.

Investors invest in many startups. Each one starts in a different valley and
starts climbing the hill. The investor's job is that one of the startups pays
off. Your job is to climb your hill quickly and cheaply.

~~~
Jakkaps
Depends on which way you look at. I wrote the article from the perspective of
a founder, not an investor. The math analogy is a bit stretched though.
Following it, the only thing that matters is where you start. If you started
in the hill leading up to the global maximum you'd be good. I have no
statistics to back this up, but I would suspect reaching a global maximum is
more expensive than reaching a local one. Truly world-changing ideas,
therefore, don't lend themselves as well to the lean methodology.

~~~
jeffdavis
I guess it's a matter of scale, like a fractal. If your idea is big enough, it
might be easy to get fooled into thinking you are at the top when a small
detour might lead to a much higher summit.

------
owens99
The point about Lean Startup is close, but ultimately incorrect. The whole
idea behind pivoting is to make a dramatic change when iteration starts to put
you into a local maximum. Eric Ries explains it exactly in this way: when each
additional iteration leads to less and less improvement, that is when it is
time to pivot. Pivoting is not A/B Testing, it is not iterating. It's making a
leap in a new direction.

~~~
thomasmeeks
Thanks for this, it resonates with me strongly but somehow I didn't pick it up
from the book.

------
api
"From what I’ve observed, really smart people tend to be right, and you can
safely accept their viewpoints."

What?

I couldn't believe this statement. It completely neglects the massive
differences that exist between people of any intelligence in terms of _what_
and _how_ they think. I'm talking about things like educational level,
ideological biases, epistemological approaches to thinking, etc. It also
completely neglects the honesty and integrity of the person you are emulating.

To give just one example: I've found that most of the "conspiracy nuts" I've
met (people who think we didn't go to the Moon, etc.) are highly intelligent,
probably pretty far above average. If anything being highly intelligent makes
it much easier to rationalize a ridiculous belief system. Any idiot can
imagine a round Earth that spins and orbits the sun but it takes someone with
very high intelligence to understand ether vortex theory. Judging by the
intricacies of their speculations the "bakers" who assemble bizarre far-
fetched conspiracy theories out of QAnon's cold reading act are also quite
intelligent.

Con artists also tend to be highly intelligent, hence my comment about honesty
and integrity.

For some odd reason it seems like a whole lot of very bright people have
adopted this weird kind of biological determinist hard materialist view of
cognition and its quality. By materialist I mean it reminds me of Marxist
dialectical materialism: the idea that the state of society is a pure function
of its technology and other capital. A bunch of people think you can measure
someone's IQ and that will tell you how correct their opinions are. Smart
people have better opinions because they can think more faster, or something.

I struggle to understand how anyone could possibly believe this. It's patently
absurd. It's roughly analogous to saying you can tell the quality of a driver
by the performance of the vehicle they are driving, or that the correctness of
a computer's output is a pure function of processor speed irrespective of what
software it's running.

~~~
knightofmars
I wager you're getting down voted due to people who see themselves as "smart"
taking taking offense at the implication that they are just as fallible as
every other human on the planet.

~~~
misterprime
I'm assuming it's downvotes for implied respect for anyone that could question
the moon landing or consider QAnon theories.

~~~
api
If that's the case then the downvoters dreadfully misread my post. That's not
what I was saying at all. I was pointing out that bad ideas can be held by
people regardless of their raw intelligence.

------
stcredzero
_People have too much faith in their opinions. Exempting yourself from a
general human behavior is dumb..._

That second phrase is gold!

~~~
x220
This sort of thing always comes up when I talk to my friends about marriage. I
tell them that I'll never get married because of the divorce statistics, and
they tell me that only dumb foolish people get divorced. I tell them "how do I
know I'm also not a dumb foolish person or whoever I marry isn't a dumb
foolish person?" I haven't found an answer to that yet.

Genuinely not trying to start a flame war, just trying to make an interesting
point.

~~~
jliptzin
That’s the kind of observation I’ve come to appreciate the older/wiser I get.
You start off life feeling invincible, that those kinds of stats won’t apply
to you because you’re not a fool like everyone else. But eventually you learn
to pay attention to the stats because much more often than not you fall pretty
close to the center of the bell curve for most things in life, _no matter
what._

------
hassan_shaikley
I find the fact that this book encourages monopolies troubling at best and
dishonest at worst. He seems to be in favor of authoritarianism and domination
more than freedom. I find it disingenuous especially for a billionaire who
preaches 'Faith' in the free market when one of his teachings is essentially
eliminating competition.

