Paul Graham puts this another way: “ the best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas.”īut even beyond the startup idea itself, most of the time founders have a strategy that they can’t reveal because the element of surprise is part of what will make it work. Only ideas that seem dumb or impossible to most people fall into the realm of ideas that could be potentially correct. If everyone thinks a startup idea is a good one, then it would have happened already, or there’s some non-obvious challenge that prevents it from happening. I think this is a really important point, and one that most casual observers of startups don’t get. Airbnb: hundreds of thousands of people would be willing host strangers in their homes, and millions of travelers would prefer those homes over a hotel.SpaceX: it is possible for a founding team without significant space or rocket experience to build a company that makes manned space flights better than NASA.Twitch: millions of people will tune in to watch other people play video games online.

Every great startup idea, he argues, is based around a thesis that most people don’t believe is true. Thiel has a lot to say about secrets, which he defines as truths that are unpopular or not widely known.

BEST IDEA: STARTUPS ARE BASED AROUND SECRETS Instead of summarizing the book, I thought I’d share my favorite and least favorite idea. Having snagged an advance reader’s copy, the book has definitely cut the word length down while retaining the ideas and most of the nuance. Luckily for all of us, the two have collaborated to write a book based on the class called Zero to One, which comes out September 18th. The ideas were intriguing, and ran counter to much of the standard startup wisdom. I had read some of the notes when they came out but they’re pretty lengthy and I didn’t get through them all.

One of the students in the class, a law student named Blake Masters, took meticulous notes that were widely shared across the web (1M+ pg views). In spring of 2012, Peter Thiel, cofounder of Paypal and Palantir and early investor in Facebook, taught a course at Stanford in the Computer Science department called CS183: Startup.

Zero to one notes