The promise of years or decades of monopoly is a powerful incentive to innovate. Progress isn’t about competition, it’s better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents. Creative monopolies give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Monopolies deserve their bad reputation only in a world where nothing changes. By monopoly, we mean a company that’s so good that no other firm can offer a close alternative. If you don’t have to worry about competing with anyone, you have the capability to care more about your workers, product, and its impact on the world.

A competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly can set its own price.Ī competitive ecosystem pushes people towards ruthlessness or death. The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly. Under perfect competition, in the long run, no company makes a profit. If you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business. Airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone. Google has 100x the profit margin of the airline industry. You need to be able to capture some of the value you create. What valuable company is nobody building? When starting a company, you need to ask yourself: The most powerful pattern in successful people is that they find value in unexpected places by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. It's better to risk boldness than triviality Have a typewriter & build a word processor Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. The act of creation is singular, it takes us from 0 to 1, and the result is something fresh and strange. If you’re copying from them, you aren’t learning from them.ĭoing what we already know what to do takes the world from 1 to n: adding more of something familiar. The next Bill Gates won’t build an operating system, and the next Larry Page won’t make a search engine. Every moment in business happens only once.

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