Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
By: Peter Thiel
Virgin Books; 1st Edition (January 1, 2001)

I am not sure what I can say about Zero To One that has not already been said. This book is a classic. I mean, it was originally published over 20 years ago! In short, Thiel talks about entrepreneurship in a fresh and insightful way that makes me want to start a side project once a year. Encouragement to build a brand, seek network effects and economies of scale, harness proprietary technology, and avoid competition gives people a great starting point to success. Zero To One should be required reading in business school. (But don’t go to business school – that’s just me).

Two of my favorite quotes:

WHENEVER I INTERVIEW someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

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This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality
By: Peter Pomerantsev
PublicAffairs (August 6, 2019)
256 pages

This Is Not Propaganda is a book about exactly that: Propaganda. See, in an age of over information, the truth is easier to drown out and distort. And that is just what we see. Then there are the tech oligarchs – in bed with the governments of the world – deciding what speech is acceptable and simply hiding what they disagree with. Of course, I am intellectually curious about the persuasion aspects of this topic. But I have no doubt centralized authority is in the business of lying for self-preservation. This book is a solid follow-up volume to Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible.

(I think the future is a private web, the bifurcation of these centralized systems. It’s a move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. But that will take time.)

Two of my favorite quotes:

Vucic has also swapped a dated form of media influence for a more sophisticated one. In 1999, Vucic would call in newspaper editors and threaten them if they didn’t toe the line. Today there are dozens of media, including many foreign ones. However, if a newspaper or television station wants to win government advertising, or if its owners want to win government contracts, then it has to toe the government line.5 It’s the same in Erdogan’s Turkey or Viktor Orbán’s Hungary: market-orientated in form, authoritarian in content. One of the premises of democratization was that a plural media based on free-market rules would help ensure democracy. It was always a tenuous idea. Tycoons with special interests often own the media in democracies, but now it can be utterly hollowed out from the inside.

And as a worldview it grants those who subscribe to it certain rewards: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess—it’s all the fault of the conspiracy. More important, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anyone’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove plot, so that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic the renowned Russian media analyst Vasily Gatov calls “white jamming.”

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