I received Peter Thiel's book (with Blake Masters) "Zero to One" early in advance. I was so excited that I spent several hours in 2 days to finish the book.

Max reading time: 8 hours (with note taking and some thinking)

As a general introduction of startup, he took a different approach to write the book, especially teaching you how to think. So do not expect you will learn things step by step, such as "how to brand your company", although it will tell you branding is crucial for durability of the startup. But it does help how to think differently, with a lot of evidences and arguments why you should do it this way. With Peter's background as a Stanford elite/alum and a serial entrepreneur, the examples he provided are very convincing and eye opening. Because not only it gives us concrete examples of successful and failed startups, but also it gives us philosophy and history and even biology reasoning. I like it this way.

The part of the book that I like the most, is the "7 questions every business must answer". The questions make it obvious to me that why Tesla, Apple, VK, Akamai, Uber, etc. can become so successful, while other business such as FitBit, Oculus, Yo, could have done better if they answer these questions before their launch.

But I have to say, some examples are taken too far from the original point, such as the (in)definite optimism/pessimism. It took me a while to follow, maybe it is because there is a very thin correlation between the two matters. In addition, I wish that there were more suggestions on the key questions, for example, how to find and convince potential team members? and how to brand a startup? Lists of books and more examples would be very helpful (the PayPal experience is great...), although it might be slightly out of scope of this book.

Some questions are very worth thinking twice, one of which is, "what important truth do few people agree you on?" Even with what I do in a Haalthy and what I learn in online classes and daily interaction with people, I at first struggled to find an answer myself, but eventually do with some deep argument inside my brain. I can imagine how difficult this question would be for those who want to start a company but do not yet know what idea they want to start with. As Paul Graham said in his own page, founders who build great startups are "living in the future". It requires extensive self-exploring experiences and knowledge to get there. Obviously simply reading a book will not be any help.

That said, time to go back to my work and study. This book is worth reading twice.

Enjoy!

p.s. thank you for using "her" to refer all the successful and nurturing companies in the book. It means a lot to female entrepreneurs.