Jack Dorsey on storytelling, Peter Thiel on the paradox of entrepreneurship, and a page from Facebook's culture manual

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: Jack Dorsey on storytelling

“I think one of the biggest things that has helped me is learning how to become a better storyteller and the power of a story.

If you want to build a product and you want to build a product that is relevant to folks, you need to put yourself in their shoes and you need to write a story from their side.

We spend a lot of time writing what’s called user narratives of this user or this person is in the middle of Chicago and they go to a coffee store in the middle of Chicago and this is the experience they’re going to have. It reads like a play.

If you do that story well, then all of the prioritization, all of the product, all of the design and all the coordination that you need to do with these products just falls out naturally.

We want to tell an epic story. We want to solve a really big problem. We don’t want to have a bunch of short stories strung together. We want one epic cohesive story that we tell the world.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Source: The Power of Curiosity and Inspiration by Stanford University

2: Peter Thiel on the paradox of entrepreneurship

“The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new.

Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar.

But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula (for innovation) cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be more innovative.

Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.”

Source: Zero to One by Peter Thiel

3: A page from Facebook’s culture manual

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

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