E
Preface
ZERO TO ONE
VERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. 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. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing
what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to
n,
adding more of
something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0
to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the
result is something fresh and strange.
Unless they invest in the di
ffi
cult task of creating new things, American
companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain
today. What happens when we’ve gained everything to be had from fine-
tuning the old lines of business that we’ve inherited? Unlikely as it sounds,
the answer threatens to be far worse than the crisis of 2008. Today’s “best
practices” lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.
In a world of gigantic administrative bureaucracies both public and
private, searching for a new path might seem like hoping for a miracle.
Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need
hundreds, or even thousands, of miracles. This would be depressing but for
one crucial fact: humans are distinguished from other species by our ability
to work miracles. We call these miracles
technology.
Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do
more with less,
ratcheting up our fundamental capabilities to a higher level. Other animals
are instinctively driven to build things like dams or honeycombs, but we are
the only ones that can invent new things and better ways of making them.
Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic
catalog of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies,
