Thiel artfully demonstrates how profits flow in a Power Law to these types of firms. Think about Google's monopoly in search (see my comment below about this), or Microsoft's former monopoly in operating systems. To summarize two broad concepts, businesses should pursue monopoly because that is where the lion's share of profit is made. In the end, the audiobook is certainly worth the price of purchase, but I fail to give it 5 stars because I know from these notes that Thiel can do better.

The course notes are better because they expound better on the broad concepts. I am a fan of Peter Thiel, and have read the notes from the Stanford course upon which this book is based.

What made the experience of listening to Zero to One the most enjoyable? Seems Insightful Until You Think A Little Deeper Ask not, what would Mark do? Ask: What valuable company is nobody building? The single most powerful pattern Thiel has noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. It draws on everything Peter Thiel has learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. From the tournament of formal schooling to the corporate obsession with outdoing rivals, competition destroys profits for individuals, companies, and society as a whole. But the more you compete, the more you become similar to everyone else. If you do what has never been done and you can do it better than anybody else, you have a monopoly - and every business is successful exactly insofar as it is a monopoly. Progress comes from monopoly, not competition. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. Every moment in business happens only once.

Zero to one blake masters