According to Me, The Series: “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel
Even before becoming a founding CEO of a technology-oriented subsidiary of a big corporation, I had read Zero to One maybe twice. It is short (relative to many other business books), thought provoking and insightful. Having come from the mouth of a person of intrigue and successful startup entrepreneur like Peter Thiel makes it especially interesting.
Despite constraints being put on our company which makes us not a typical startup and hence lessons from the book may not apply directly, many lessons can still be adopted. This is also a book taken to heart by the founding member of the board which made us on the same page somewhat: we are here to create a progress in the manner of 0 to 1 (vertical breakthrough), rather than 1 to N (horizontal expansion). This writing is in the context of creating this new technology company.
Here are a few points that stick with me in the context of our company
- Create a monopoly
What we need
- Proprietary technology which is 10x better than any existing solution (Our positioning of technical expertise and potential access to unique data sets should enable us to achieve this. When it comes to existing solution, it is not only competitor offering similar technologies but other ways of doing things, for example, manual data entry)
- Network effect (Not directly applicable but always possible if you think creatively, I believe!)
- Economy of scale (This is at the heart of what we need to do. One word comes to mind: Automation)
- Branding (Ok. We will be most admired AI company in Thailand etc.)
2. How to build a monopoly
- Dominate niche market (Surely, working with big mother company means we can dominate? The challenge is will others accept solution from competitor’s close relative.)
- Once dominate, then expand to adjacent market. (For us, once insurance back office is dominated, we will be the AI back-office for other businesses too).
- Build partnership. Don’t disrupt. Examples come to mind PayPal-Visa, Google-AOL in the early days.
- Make last great development in a market and reap benefit of mature ecosystem (Online insurance. Online banking. e-Commerce. Some are mature more than others)
3. The Secret
Basically it is about finding a secret no others have found, whether it is the technology to do certain things, a vision of the future that nobody thought would be possible, or the believe that the majority would disagree upon. Courage (to stick through) is even harder to come by than the genius that come up with the ideas/technology.
These things influence my thinking on how we build a company. Obviously, even with the blueprints like this, challenges remain. Courage to stick with it and convince people; employees, partners, customers or even regulators, that the future can be different (the way we propose it to be) is probably the hardest one.
