
Peter Thiel’s advice on startups - StylifyYourBlog
https://medium.com/@paulmillr/zero-to-one-summary-8dbda22e1559
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jrochkind1
> You may argue that monopolies are bad, but...

The "but" is all BS. The answer is "You might argue that monopolies are bad,
but you're thinking like a consumer not a company. Monopolies are good for you
as a company because they result in profits, which is the whole point here.
Remember that 17-cent-per-ticket-profit figure from the last sentance? That
might be a good number for consumers, but it sure isn't for the airlines.
You're starting a company, think like a company."

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api
It seems like a special case of the paradox of thrift: it's rational to save,
but if everyone saves nobody can save because for one to save another must
spend.

(Even if you don't like some of Keynes other ideas, this was one of his key
insights. The other is the importance of the velocity of money in the wealth
of societies. Superficially Saudi Arabia looks richer than the US because per
capita it has more savings, but it's actually poorer because monetary velocity
is lower. Wealth is a verb, not a noun.)

In this case you want to be a monopoly, but you want all your suppliers and
anyone else you purchase from to be subject to brutal competition. Or as an
employee, you want _your_ employer to be a monopoly (and your own skills to be
scarce in the labor market) but you want the rest of the market to be brutally
competitive.

You can see this in the net neutrality debate. Those who run the Internet want
to monopolize and differentiate. Those who use the Internet -- including most
non-carrier Internet companies -- want them to be pure commodities subject to
crushing competition. The ideal for you the user, or for Netflix or Google,
would be to have free broadband Internet access everywhere.

Paradoxes are the norm not the exception in complex systems fields like
economics, ecology, and evolutionary dynamics. Most things involve some sort
of paradoxical catch-22, trade-off, trichotomy, or N-chotomy. Thiel is just
showing us this paradox from a different perspective than we're normally
accustomed to thinking about it. It is the proper perspective for an
entrepreneur-- you want to find _something_ that can be leveraged to create a
monopoly so you can accumulate capital and income enough to move on to the
next things before your monopoly status is challenged.

~~~
jiggy2011
The immigration debates in other threads are another example of this, and to
an extent debates about intellectual property.

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staunch
> _Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new
> categories of products. Microsoft had a huge monopoly in operating systems.
> At the same time, Apple’s iOS & Google’s Android emerged and overtook
> operating system dominance._

He uses the word monopoly but all he's talking about is proprietary advantage.
Starbucks doesn't have a monopoly on coffee, and yet they're absolutely
dominant due to their business methods and brand.

Unless you start playing semantic games by saying that Starbucks has a
monopoly on the use of the Starbrucks brand. Or Apple's hugely profitable PC
sales are only possible due to their monopoly usage of Apple's OSX.

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therealdrag0
This is a good summary of the book and a sufficient alternative to actually
reading it.

Source: Read it last week.

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justinzollars
After reading this book, this is a very good summary.

