#278 Peter Thiel

#278彼得·蒂尔

Founders

商务

2022-11-23

56 分钟
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What I learned from rereading Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel.

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  • Steve Jobs return to Apple demonstrated the irreplaceable value of a company's founder.

  • In some ways, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were opposites.

  • Jobs was an artist, preferred closed systems, and spent his time thinking about great products above all else.

  • Gates was a businessman, kept his products open, and wanted to run the world.

  • But both pushed the companies they started to achievements that nobody else would have been able to match.

  • A college dropout who walked around barefoot and refused to shower, Jobs was also the insider of his own personality cult.

  • He could act charismatic or crazy.

  • All this eccentricity backfired on him.

  • In 1985, Apple's board effectively kicked Jobs out of his own company when he clashed with the professional CEO brought in to provide adult supervision.

  • Jobs returned to Apple twelve years later shows how the most important task in business, the creation of new value, cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.

  • When he was hired as interim CEO of Apple in 1997, the impeccably credentialed executives who preceded him had steered the company nearly to bankruptcy.

  • That year.

  • Michael Dell famously said of Apple, what would I do?

  • I'd shut it down and give the money back to shareholders.

  • Instead, Jobs introduced the iPod, then the iPhone, and then the iPad before he had to resign in 2011 because of poor health.

  • By the following year, Apple was the single most valuable company in the world.

  • Apple's value crucially depended on the singular vision of a particular person.

  • This hints at the strange ways in which the companies that create new technology often resemble monarchies rather than organizations that that are supposedly more modern.

  • A unique founder can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades.

  • Paradoxically, impersonal bureaucracies staffed by trained professionals can last longer than any lifetime, but they usually act with short time horizons.