Thiel flipped Tolstoy's famous opening line from Anna Karenina — 'All happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way' — and applied it to business. In his inversion, uniqueness was the source of corporate happiness, and sameness was the disease. The insight was that monopolies succeed precisely because they've found something no one else is doing, while failing companies all look the same because they're trapped in competition. 'The next Mark Zuckerberg won't build a social network. The next Larry Page won't build a search engine. The next Bill Gates won't build an operating system.' If you're copying these people, Thiel argued, you're not learning from them. Every great company was a one-of-a-kind that invented something genuinely new.