Blake Masters > Quotes

“The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad).”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. This”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“No sector will ever be so important that merely participating in it will be enough to build a great company.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius. Most”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“you must study the endgame before everything else.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“It might take months to develop the right relationships. You might make a sale only once every year or two. Then you’ll usually have to follow up during installation and service the product long after the deal is done. It’s hard to do, but this kind of “complex sales” is the only way to sell some of the most valuable products.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“WHENEVER I INTERVIEW someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“But suppose we say that Google is primarily an advertising company. That changes things. The U.S. search engine advertising market is $17 billion annually. Online advertising is $37 billion annually. The entire U.S. advertising market is $150 billion. And global advertising is a $495 billion market. So even if Google completely monopolized U.S. search engine advertising, it would own just 3.4% of the global advertising market. From this angle, Google looks like a small player in a competitive world.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?—is difficult to answer directly. It may be easier to start with a preliminary: what does everybody agree on? “Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad). If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world. These are the kind of elementary truths we teach to second graders, but they are easy to forget in a world where so much of what we do is repeat what has been done before.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“that’s”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Indefinite fears about the far future shouldn’t stop us from making definite plans today.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“it’s useful to distinguish between three concepts: • Ownership: who legally owns a company’s equity? • Possession: who actually runs the company on a day-to-day basis? • Control: who formally governs the company’s affairs?”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

“Eroom’s law—that’s Moore’s law backward—observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950.”
― Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future