描述
#From Zero to One
In 2012, I took a class taught by Peter Thiel on Startups at Stanford. I furiously took down everything I could catch, edited the notes into essays, and put them online. They became a viral phenomenon in the startup community.
About a year later I thought, why not turn this into an eBook? My friend Kyle Kirchhoff started helping me put it together. But he insisted we also make a limited-edition physical copy — something beautiful, something that we’d still be proud to have on our shelves in 50 years. With our friend Dan, we developed a visual concept that got us all pretty excited: a cover of the book, which we thought we should call “*Zero to One*”, nicely cloth-bound and featuring Ben Franklin flying a kite.
This mockup cover was basically the first thing I showed Peter at our first meeting where I pitched him on this book. Once we had this vision – really, once we had that great title, *Zero to One*, to faithfully encapsulate our thinking on technological stagnation, and Peter's lessons for how to create new technology companies – it was clear that we had to write the book.
Ben Franklin didn’t make the final cover. And Kyle and Dan soon peeled off because once we sold the book to a publisher, “the project got too corporate.” But Jimmy Kaltreider (who is largely the reason the book is so clear and concise) and I worked with Peter, and *Zero to One*, published in 2014, became a #1 New York Times bestseller. It has now sold nearly 4 million copies worldwide.
*Blake Masters, Co-author Zero to One*