I recently re-read Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, written with Blake Masters, in which Peter Thiel identifies “four lessons that entrepreneurs learned from the dot-com crash, lessons [formulas] that still guide business thinking today”:

1. Make incremental advances
2. Stay lean and flexible
3. Improve on the competition
4. Focus on product, not sales

These lessons “have become dogma in the start-up world; those who ignore them are presumed to invite the justified doom visited upon technology in the great crash of 2000. And yet the opposite [first] principles are probably more correct”:

1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality.
2. A bad plan is better than no plan.
3. Competitive markets destroy profits.
4. Sales matters just as much as product.

I agree with Thiel that in order to build the next generation of companies, “we must abandon the dogma created after the crash.” Here’s his challenge to all business leaders: “Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better — to go from 0 to 1…and then 1 to n. [That is, to proceed from status quo to vertical or intensive progress with technology that creates new things, and then, to achieve horizontal or extensive progress with globalization by copying/duplicating whatever works.] The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.”

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Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking about the future.