THE JOY OF READING

A thousand typewriters is progress. A word processor is something else entirely. Peter Thiel calls the first kind of progress horizontal: going from 1 to n. The second is vertical: going from 0 to 1. Most companies spend their lives improving what already exists. Thiel argues that real progress comes from creating something that didn't exist before. Everything else in the book is really an extension of that one idea. He talks about focus, but not in the usual "follow your pas