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

HOW TO FIND SECRETS
There are two kinds of secrets: secrets of nature and secrets about people.
Natural secrets exist all around us; to find them, one must study some
undiscovered aspect of the physical world. Secrets about people are different:
they are things that people don’t know about themselves or things they hide
because they don’t want others to know. So when thinking about what kind of
company to build, there are two distinct questions to ask: What secrets is nature
not telling you? What secrets are people not telling you?
It’s easy to assume that natural secrets are the most important: the people who
look for them can sound intimidatingly authoritative. This is why physics PhDs
are notoriously difficult to work with—because they know the most fundamental
truths, they think they know all truths. But does understanding electromagnetic
theory automatically make you a great marriage counselor? Does a gravity
theorist know more about your business than you do? At PayPal, I once
interviewed a physics PhD for an engineering job. Halfway through my first
question, he shouted, “Stop! I already know what you’re going to ask!” But he
was wrong. It was the easiest no-hire decision I’ve ever made.
Secrets about people are relatively underappreciated. Maybe that’s because
you don’t need a dozen years of higher education to ask the questions that
uncover them: What are people not allowed to talk about? What is forbidden or
taboo?
Sometimes looking for natural secrets and looking for human secrets lead to
the same truth. Consider the monopoly secret again: competition and capitalism
are opposites. If you didn’t already know it, you could discover it the natural,
empirical way: do a quantitative study of corporate profits and you’ll see they’re
eliminated by competition. But you could also take the human approach and ask:
what are people running companies not allowed to say? You would notice that
monopolists downplay their monopoly status to avoid scrutiny, while
competitive firms strategically exaggerate their uniqueness. The differences
between firms only seem small on the surface; in fact, they are enormous.
The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking. Most people
think only in terms of what they’ve been taught; schooling itself aims to impart
conventional wisdom. So you might ask: are there any fields that matter but
haven’t been standardized and institutionalized? Physics, for example, is a real