Zero to One_ Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future ( PDFDrive )

ENERGY 2.0
Tesla’s success proves that there was nothing inherently wrong with cleantech.
The biggest idea behind it is right: the world really will need new sources of
energy. Energy is the master resource: it’s how we feed ourselves, build shelter,
and make everything we need to live comfortably. Most of the world dreams of
living as comfortably as Americans do today, and globalization will cause
increasingly severe energy challenges unless we build new technology. There
simply aren’t enough resources in the world to replicate old approaches or
redistribute our way to prosperity.
Cleantech gave people a way to be optimistic about the future of energy. But
when indefinitely optimistic investors betting on the general idea of green energy
funded cleantech companies that lacked specific business plans, the result was a
bubble. Plot the valuation of alternative energy firms in the 2000s alongside the
NASDAQ’s rise and fall a decade before, and you see the same shape:
The 1990s had one big idea: the internet is going to be big. But too many
internet companies had exactly that same idea and no others. An entrepreneur
can’t benefit from macro-scale insight unless his own plans begin at the microscale.
Cleantech companies faced the same problem: no matter how much the