(p. A15) Peter Thiel is larger than life even for a Silicon Valley billionaire. He co-founded PayPal, was the first investor in Facebook , and funded LinkedIn, Spotify, SpaceX and Airbnb. Now he has written a much-needed explanation of the information economy, masquerading as a breezy how-to book for entrepreneurs. “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future” is based on lectures Mr. Thiel gave at Stanford.
He hopes more entrepreneurs will focus on big ideas for health, energy and transportation; his venture firm’s tag line is “They promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters,” a reference to Twitter. His explanation of innovation is also a primer on how free markets work. He encourages entrepreneurs to ask: “What valuable company is nobody building?”
For the full commentary, see:
L. GORDON CROVITZ. “INFORMATION AGE; Three Cheers for ‘Creative Monopolies’.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Oct. 13, 2014): A15.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 12, 2014.)
The book praised in the passage quoted above is:
Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. New York: Crown Business, 2014.