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This is the ideal position for any business to be in and it’s what you should focus on when developing your new idea or determining which path to take your business in.
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To be a monopoly is to enjoy no competition and to have market dominance over your niche or product type. To the entrepreneur, a monopoly is the finish line. Thus, maximizing efficiency involves focusing most of your efforts on improving the producing 20% of your product or business model and ignoring the other 80% as much as possible. Many self-help and financial books also use this rule to demonstrate the universal truth: 80% of your profits or yield will be produced by 20% of your customers or products. This way is the only consistent method behind monopoly creation. Instead, the truly successful will put all of their effort behind one unique idea or business plan and throw all of their weight behind that effort. Peter Thiel claims that successful entrepreneurs will not spread their efforts too thinly across a diverse portfolio of different business ideas or backup careers. A 3 Minute Summary of the 15 Core Lessons
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In it, he describes the major ways in which you can be a successful entrepreneur and how to craft the best company you possibly can. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.Zero to One: Notes on Startups is a book by Peter Thiel, a famous American investor, and entrepreneur. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1.
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You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a “minimum viable product,” and iterate our way to success. “Even in engineering-driven Silicon Valley, the buzzwords of the moment call for building a “lean startup” that can “adapt” and “evolve” to an ever-changing environment.
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