The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange. This book is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything Peter Thiel has learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir as well as from being an investor in hundreds of start-ups, including Facebook and SpaceX. The single most powerful pattern Thiel has noticed is, successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.
Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
$27
Crown Publishing Group
September 2014
