Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

what important truth do very few people agree
with you on?
If we already understand as much of the natural world as we ever will—if
all of today’s conventional ideas are already enlightened, and if everything has already
been done—then there are no good answers. Contrarian thinking doesn’t make any sense
unless the world still has secrets left to give up.
Of course, there are many things we don’t yet understand, but some of those things
may be impossible to figure out—mysteries rather than secrets. For example, string
theory describes the physics of the universe in terms of vibrating one-dimensional
objects called “strings.” Is string theory true? You can’t really design experiments to test
it. Very few people, if any, could ever understand all its implications. But is that just
because it’s difficult? Or is it an impossible mystery? The difference matters. You can
achieve difficult things, but you can’t achieve the impossible.
Recall the business version of our contrarian question: 
what valuable company is
nobody building?
Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and
unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are many secrets left in the world,
there are probably many world-changing companies yet to be started. This chapter will
help you think about secrets and how to find them.

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WHY AREN’T PEOPLE LOOKING FOR SECRETS?
Most people act as if there were no secrets left to find. An extreme representative of this
view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child
prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a
professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year
terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and
businesspeople.
In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was. The
biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously
mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for
a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized his writing style and
turned him in.
You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the
manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual
“needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining
at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals into three groups:
1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort;
2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and
3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes.
This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski
argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have
already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those
tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do,
even Einstein couldn’t have done. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing
institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard
problems anew.
Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is
all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux
vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to
an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth
doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and
become a barista.

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Hipster or Unabomber?
A l l fundamentalists think this way, not just terrorists and hipsters. Religious
fundamentalism, for example, allows no middle ground for hard questions: there are easy
truths that children are expected to rattle off, and then there are the mysteries of God,
which can’t be explained. In between—the zone of hard truths—lies heresy. In the
modern religion of environmentalism, the easy truth is that we must protect the
environment. Beyond that, Mother Nature knows best, and she cannot be questioned.
Free marketeers worship a similar logic. The value of things is set by the market. Even a
child can look up stock quotes. But whether those prices make sense is not to be second-
guessed; the market knows far more than you ever could.
Why has so much of our society come to believe that there are no hard secrets left? It
might start with geography. There are no blank spaces left on the map anymore. If you
grew up in the 18th century, there were still new places to go. After hearing tales of
foreign adventure, you could become an explorer yourself. This was probably true up
through the 19th and early 20th centuries; after that point photography from