Mental Model1 book · 4 highlights

The Company as Conspiracy to Change the World

Books Teaching This Pattern

Evidence

Zero to One by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters — book cover

Zero to One

Peter Thiel, Blake Masters · 4 highlights

  1. "Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator."

  2. "The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed."

  1. "everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission."

  2. "small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better."

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