Zero to one Notes on startups, or how to build the future

IGNORE THE SCENT of self-congratulation that wafts from nearly every book in the How to Succeed category and what remains is largess, priced to move. The subtext reads something like this: "I made it big, and if you follow my advice, sold here for a fraction of what it cost me, you can, too." But pure altruism rarely explains much, and the ulterior motives behind these works are often as interesting as their catechisms. The veneer of beneficence is somehow easier to see through in audiobook form, as evidenced by the works reviewed here. Of the three, "Zero to One: Notes on Startups; Or, How to Build the Future," by the Silicon Valley investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, spends the least amount of time justifying itself. This gives the book the feel of an advertisement for a man who believes he has no need to advertise. Which is a very savvy approach to self-promotion. "Zero to One" distills lectures from a class about startups that Thiel taught at Stanford in 2012, based on the scribblings of his former student Blake Masters, who is credited with a writing assist and who capably narrates the book. The lessons of Thiel's course are too important to be limited to a few lucky undergraduates, we are told in the preface: "There's no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley." So what future-shaping advice does Thiel have for the next generation of entrepreneurs? First, competition is expensive, risky, and it invariably reduces profits. So your goal is not to dream up a company in a field that already exists and then fight for market share. No, the smart move is to found a business in a still unimagined realm - an act of creation that Thiel, a serial catchphrase coiner, calls "going from zero to one." Once you've pioneered a new industry, you and your colleagues should set your sights on a very specific goal: building a monopoly. "Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price," Thiel tells us, "a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices." Thiel's favorite example is Google, which all but invented the online advertising market and has dominated it for years. As advice goes, "Create the next Google" is both unassailable and perfectly useless. Thiel glancingly acknowledges that the type of start-up he is describing is rare, but the fortune he made at PayPal, and later as an investor in Facebook, has apparently convinced him that the exceptional would be far more common if people were just bolder and more imaginative. He makes this and other points in brief chapters packed with references to Pythagoras, the Unabomber, Tolkien, Karl Marx, Jim Morrison, Nietzsche, John Rawls and Shakespeare. In interviews and speeches, Thiel has displayed a sense of humor that would have been helpful here. Listening to this five-hour production is like getting stuck at a dinner party beside a guy whose money and surfeit of ideas has convinced him that he should do all the talking. IT TAKES a while to figure out the real point of "Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies," by Charles Koch, the chief executive of Koch Industries. The preface, narrated by Koch himself - Paul Michael, whose voice you might recall from "The Da Vinci Code" audiobook, handles the rest - is a folksy origins story, traced to the family patriarch, Fred Koch, a "John Wayne-type" chemical engineer. The younger Koch, now 80 years old, quickly segues into the tale of the astounding growth of the company, which currently employs some 100,000 people in fields as varied as oil, ranching and commodities trading. One thousand dollars invested in this privately held behemoth in 1960, Koch states, would be worth $5 million today. The secret? Market-Based Management, Koch says, which turns out to be a perfectly sensible, five-part framework for making decisions about hiring, firing and managing a company. But that framework was the subject of Koch's 2007 book, "The Science of Success." So what we have here is a rehash and, at a running time that exceeds nine hours, quite a slog, despite Michael's comfortingly authoritative voice. The bulk of "Good Profit" is self-evident truths that have been repackaged as wisdom. Typical is this mouthful from a chapter called "Incentives": "Every company should strive to leverage incentives to motivate all employees to fully develop and apply their capabilities to maximize long-term value for the company in a principled way." O.K. Did someone suggest otherwise? The liveliest part of "Good Profit," and arguably its reason for being, is a series of homilies in favor of free markets and against corporate welfare and special pleading of any kind. Profit that is "good" is earned honestly, without favors from the government. Giving a counterexample, Koch denounces a 2014 French law intended to aid independent bookstores by banning online booksellers from offering free shipping. "Artificially propping up businesses is bad for consumers," he writes, "and ultimately bad for the employees of those businesses, since change is inevitable." There is hardly a hint here that Koch and his younger brother David are among the most politically active executives in American history. Together, they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars backing candidates who stand against regulations and taxes. By the midterm elections of 2010, according to Jane Mayer's book "Dark Money," these efforts yielded astounding results. Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives and Republicans gained 675 seats in state legislatures across the country. Given that Koch Industries is among the country's leading producers of toxic waste and has spent millions settling cases in federal court, these guys are not exactly disinterested parties. No, they don't lobby politicians. They just have them replaced. Whether you think this strategy leads to "good profit" depends on where you stand politically. But Koch's very hands-on role in American politics is a bizarre omission in a book about the intersection of business and government. "TEAM OF TEAMS," by retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal and three co-authors, appears to have several goals. It works as a calling card for his consulting firm, McChrystal Group, which brings "lessons from the battlefield to the boardroom," as the company's website says. The book is also a history of one of his great victories: the pursuit and eventual killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the elusive and sociopathic leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Unfortunately, McChrystal the consultant keeps interrupting McChrystal the general. After every twist and complication in the al-Zarqawi story, we pause so that some theoretical concept - usually related to how groups are organized, and how McChrystal tinkered with command structure in Iraq - can be illustrated with a historical anecdote. Thus we get a potted biography of Frederick Taylor, the father of industrial efficiency; an account of NASA in its moonshot era; the story of Horatio Nelson's victory at Trafalgar; and mini-lectures on subjects as diverse as game theory and the Navy SEALs. McChrystal turns up to narrate five-minute summaries at the end of each chapter (Paul Michael, once again, handles everything else). No doubt these are meant as refreshers, but they make you wonder if this hybrid of management course and combat memoir really needs to be 12 hours long. That's especially true when McChrystal describes his great "aha" moment in the battle against Al Qaeda in Iraq: "We realized that our goal was not the creation of one massive team. We needed to create a team of teams." He means an organization in which groups from different fiefs, like the C.I.A. and the Army Special Forces, work together, rather than in competitive silos. That's the big reveal. Which is heartbreaking, because right after September 11 it was obvious that the intelligence agencies hadn't been communicating. McChrystal addresses this failure in a section called "Sharing." But he doesn't explain how lessons of that calamity could have been forgotten a few years later, let alone stand as the title-worthy insight of this overstuffed audiobook. DAVID SEGAL is a reporter in the business section of The Times.