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

SECRETS
EVERY ONE OF TODAY’S most famous and familiar ideas was once unknown and
unsuspected. The mathematical relationship between a triangle’s sides, for
example, was secret for millennia. Pythagoras had to think hard to discover it. If
you wanted in on Pythagoras’s new discovery, joining his strange vegetarian cult
was the best way to learn about it. Today, his geometry has become a convention
—a simple truth we teach to grade schoolers. A conventional truth can be
important—it’s essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example—but it
won’t give you an edge. It’s not a secret.
Remember our contrarian question: 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