There are busy people, and then there is Peter Thiel.  When he’s not running Founders Fund, his San Francisco based VC fund, he’s helping to lead Palantir, the data analytics company he founded that currently has million dollar contracts with the US DoD and global financial institutions.  If Thiel has a few minutes left in the day, you can probably find him running the Thiel Fellowship, the controversial program incentivizing under-20 whiz kids to leave traditional education routes so they can start and grow their own ventures.  With all of this on his schedule, Theil managed to find some time to write a book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. 

The origins of Zero to One started with a computer science class at Stanford taught by Thiel in 2012.  One of the students, Blake Masters, took detailed notes from Thiel’s class and put them online.  The notes quickly amassed a wide following and the two teamed up a year later to turn the notes and course material into Zero to One, which now sits near the top of the New York Times Business Bestellers list.  

The book, about a 3.5 hour read according to its website, offers simple yet valuable advice and suggestions on crucial entrepreneurial topics like board member selection and equity compensation.  Theil devotes a heavy chunk of the book to his unique take on the nature of “competitive monopolies” and how great companies don’t seek, but avoid competition.  “Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world,” Theil writes. “Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society; they’re powerful engines for making it better.”  If you want to hear more about Thiel’s interesting take on monopolies and competition, check out his recent lecture on the topic here

Some chapters of Zero to One stray off into Theil’s observations on sociology, mathematics, economics, philosophy and everything in between.  Fortunately, Thiel’s intellect and writing skills keep these sections of the book from coming off as rambling and instead display the author’s acumen and interest in topics beyond entrepreneurship and startups.  Likening the founding of our solar system and the United States of America to the beginnings of starting a company is just one of the many ways in which Theil finds ways to connect a wide swath of topics to the valuable lessons he learned as co-founder of PayPal in the early 2000s. 

 In one chapter, Thiel instructs founders on what to look for when growing their team. While he admits that doing so is challenging given the competitive nature of hiring talented employees, he implores founders to lure employees in with the company’s mission and team, not free laundry or pet day.  “Don’t fight the perk war,” Theil writes. “Just cover the basics like health insurance and then promise what no others can: the opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside great people.”  Again we see another example where Thiel’s word’s mean even more given his involvement in creating PayPal and its network of wildly successful founders, often dubbed the “PayPal Mafia”.

 Everyone from the seasoned investor to the first time entrepreneur can glean something interesting from Zero to One.  If you have some free time – hopefully a bit more than Peter Thiel – pick up a copy to get an interesting read that covers the beginnings of the tech boom in Silicon Valley and the beginnings of a company from an author who knows quite a bit about both.  

Alexis Ohanian knows a thing or two about startups.  The founder of Reddit and Hipmunk has taken the video journalism for his latest adventure by going out and meeting rapidly growing startups and the people behind them.  "Small Empires" is a weekly series brought to you by tech/design/review site the Verge (hosted by Ohanian), that profiles an intriguing startup each episode and lets their employees and founders tell the story of the ups and downs of creating and running a business.

 I was turned onto the show thanks my friend Nik Fuller and was hooked immediately.  Although I'm a bit late to the game as Small Empires is already early into its second season, its fairly easy to catchup on the first season with Youtube.  Besides high production quality and editing, an appealing element of Small Empires is its dedication to profiling early users or brand loyalists for each startup it profiles.  So whether its a a doctor on ZocDoc's platform or a small business building their e-commerce site with Squarespace, it's nice to get a true sense of the impact these companies are having when everyday people praise the business just as much as the founders and employees do.  

           
                        Below is a gallery listing some of the companies featured on Small Empires