Peter Thiel is the co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook. In the spring of 2012, he gave a lecture course at Stanford for software engineers, calling on them to think boldly and broadly about how they might use their skills to shape the future, and imparting the lessons he has gleaned from his own experience. One of the students in that class - Blake Masters - took notes and posted them online. The blog posts became a huge success, with hundreds of thousands of hits, and became the basis for 'Zero to One'.