Blake Masters

Blake Masters grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and studied political science and then law at Stanford. In 2012, as a law student, he took Peter Thiel's course on startups and posted detailed notes on each class online. The notes spread widely in Silicon Valley.

Thiel and Masters turned them into Zero to One (2014), a short book that argues real progress means making something new rather than copying what exists, and that founders should aim to build companies that escape competition. It became a standard text for startup founders and has sold millions of copies.

Masters went on to work for Thiel for a decade, as president of the Thiel Foundation and chief operating officer of Thiel Capital. He co-founded a legal-research startup, Judicata. In 2022 he was the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in Arizona and lost the general election, and in 2024 he ran for the House of Representatives and lost the primary. He lives in Tucson.