The most eye-catching thing in China’s scientific and technological circles is undoubtedly Baidu’s introduction of the “Singularity” theory from the American Jidian University into the country, allowing many people to re-recognize a new “thing”. The following does not intend to describe anything related to Singularity University, but is derived from a set of "Singularity Series" books recommended by Singularity University.
Different from the profoundness of Singularity Theory, the Singularity series of books conveys to readers more the management ideas from top American entrepreneurs. It has a business philosophy that changes the world and has Highly readable and practical; while in China, under the new engine of "mass entrepreneurship and innovation", tens of thousands of "grassroots" entrepreneurs to business managers can all learn from the "Singularity Series" Learn from the world's leading innovation, entrepreneurship and business management ideas.
During the study process at Hejun Business School, I constantly felt the thinking of entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs, which is a great touch for people who are still in ordinary jobs, and After reading the book "From 0 to 1", I became more convinced that it was a wise choice for me to be lucky enough to participate in Hejun's study.
"From 0 to 1" originated from an entrepreneurship course taught by Peter Thiel, the godfather of Silicon Valley venture capital, at Stanford in 2012. During this period, one of his students took detailed notes and posted it online, attracting 2.4 million hits. Later, Peter participated in compiling this magical note into "From 0 to 1".
For Peter Thiel, his halo is still dazzling: the founder of PayPal, the first angel investor of Facebook, the chief helmsman of the "PayPal gang" in Silicon Valley... In short, a man with a unique Thousands of reasons to preach "successful learning" to the elite.
In fact, Peter Thiel’s core point is not difficult to understand. In his view, there are two ways for human society to progress: 1. Horizontal progress, horizontal development, copying existing experience, from 1 to N, the biggest dividend is globalization; 2. Vertical progress, vertical development, exploring unknown areas, From 0 to 1, let new things come out of the cocoon, and entrepreneurial teams should be obsessed with the second kind of progress.
He himself is the predecessor of "from 0 to 1". Because he created PayPal, in Thiel's eyes, the rapid development of the IT industry today has, to some extent, obscured the paleness of progress in other areas of humankind. He once criticized investors in Silicon Valley who only dared to invest in startups with light capital in order to seek immediate profits. As a result, mankind has made great progress at the bit level over the past few decades, but little progress at the atomic level. His personal investment areas cover space exploration rockets, nanotechnology, robot development, cancer treatment and anti-aging research - in other words, he is indeed qualified to "disdain" those "from 1 to N" investors.
Compared with “from 0 to 1”, Thiel’s other point of view is somewhat contrary to “common sense”. He believes that the highest form of corporate competition is two words: monopoly. Traditional competition is generally competition from 1 to n, that is, fighting for channels, advertising, and resources. Competition on the Internet requires learning to compete from 0 to 1, fighting for users, innovation, and products.
To achieve monopoly, start-up companies must start from the vertical market. What they need to focus on is not the size of the future market, but how much market share they occupy in the current vertical field.
So what should you do if you encounter competitors who enter the market at the same time as you? Thiel gave a familiar answer: If you can't defeat the "enemy," join forces with him. Will this scenario sound familiar to you? The mergers between Internet giants in the past two years have given us such worries, such as the recent Didi-Uber merger. At the beginning of the merger, we could see the reaction of most of the market. It is a monopoly, because Didi and Uber account for 90% of the orders in the online ride-hailing market. The public almost instinctively resists monopolies, as if the monopolist’s next move will be to raise prices, and the prices that emerged after the merger of Didi and Uber further confirmed the public’s speculation.
To be sure, Thiel clearly doesn’t see it that way, and history seems to be on his side.
Many economists believe that it is difficult to find examples of price increases and success after corporate monopoly, because at least in theory, in a competitive environment based on a free market economy (rather than dominated by the government), due to the lack of control over potential competitors, Due to fear, monopolies with normal IQs will not choose to raise prices. On the contrary, in order to raise the industry threshold as much as possible, they will even think about how to lower product prices while improving product quality.
Why do people believe that competition is healthy? Thiel's answer: Competition isn't just an economic concept, it's an idea - one that pervades society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize the necessity of competition, and enact laws to compete (he believes our education system also encourages us to compete). The result is that, despite increasing competition, we actually get less and less, and we trap ourselves in the competition.
It is almost certain that nothing in the business world will happen again. “The next Bill Gates will not develop operating systems, the next Larry Page or Sergey Brin will not develop search engines, and the next Mark Zuckerberg will not create social media. Network. If you copy what these people do, you are not learning from them." Thiel believes that "the history of progress is actually the process of continuous replacement of monopolies, because monopolies promote social progress over years or even decades. Years of monopoly profits are a powerful incentive for innovation. Monopolies will continue to innovate after that, because profits give them the capital to plan for the long-term future and they have the ability to invest in ambitious research projects.”
From 0 to 1. The most intuitive feeling it brings to people is that what we need to start a business is innovation. It is not easy to start from 0 to 1 again, but it contains the greatest energy. Entrepreneurs are constantly looking for opportunities for entrepreneurial projects. At the same time, is it possible to think from 0 to 1? As Thiel said: "If you want to create and obtain lasting value, don't just follow the trend and build a business without characteristics." Most entrepreneurs can easily get lost in this way. A process, but it contains a lot of thinking, as entrepreneurs, how can we go from 0 to 1? Or is 1 to N the best choice for us to start a business?
From 0 to 1 is not a real entrepreneurial guide, but for me after reading this book, it gave me enough inspiration. Even if I may not engage in entrepreneurship in the future, I will start from scratch. Thinking from scratch is what gives me the greatest reward.
The following are some of the more intriguing sentences mentioned in the book. Yuan shared with you that the same book has different meanings for everyone who reads it. I just hope that we can be in it. Find what works best for you.
PS: Some selections from the book:
1. The purpose of a business is to make profits, not to lose money.
2. Experience: proceed step by step, stay streamlined and flexible, compete while improving, and focus on products rather than marketing (of course he slapped himself in the face with the latter sentence).
3. Non-monopolies exaggerate their uniqueness by defining their market as the intersection of smaller markets; conversely, monopolies exaggerate their uniqueness by describing their market as the union of several large markets. Pretend their monopoly (it seems that domestic entrepreneurs are telling the previous story, and, after this sentence, he was slapped in the face).
4. In all dramas of human conflict, people tend to ignore what is really important and focus only on their competitors.
5. If you cannot defeat your opponent, then join forces with your opponent (think of the recent domestic market...).
6. Characteristics of monopolies:
a. Patented technology: The clearest way is to create something completely new; if you can do it ten times better, you can avoid it Competition; you too can make tenfold improvements through superior integrated design.
b. Network effect: Unless your product has value to initial users when the network group is still small, it will not be affected by network effects.
c. Brand advantage: The most obvious monopoly of a company is the monopoly on its own brand.
7. “Destruction” has recently been misinterpreted as a complacent buzzword describing so-called new things and new trends.
8. Successful business establishment and openness are the secrets of how the world works.
9. Time is the most valuable asset, and wasting time on people who cannot cooperate for a long time is not worth the gain.
10. Selling the company to the media is a prerequisite for selling it to others.
11. The significant difference between any machine means that the results obtained from cooperation with computers are much higher than those obtained from dealing with humans... Computers are tools, not competitors.
12. The most anti-mainstream action is not to resist the trend, but to abandon one's independent thinking in the trend.