The Seven Questions Test

Overview

Most business failures are not bad luck — they are unexamined answers. In Zero to One (2014, ch. 13), Peter Thiel and Blake Masters argue that every business must answer seven questions: Engineering (breakthrough technology, not incremental improvement), Timing (why now), Monopoly (big share of a small market), People (the right team), Distribution (a way to deliver, not just create), Durability (defensible in 10–20 years), and Secret (a unique opportunity others don't see). Thiel's calibration is blunt: answer all seven and you can build a monopoly; answer five or six and it might work; fewer, and failure will arrive looking like bad luck — but it wasn't luck, it was skipped questions.

The test's power is not the list — anyone can recite seven words. The power is the gate: each question demands a written, evidence-backed answer scored 1–5, and a question you cannot answer in writing with evidence scores a 1, not a hopeful 3. Vibes do not pass the gate. The book's own natural experiment makes the case: cleantech companies of the ~2005–2012 bubble routinely skipped four or more questions and died (Solyndra's 2011 bankruptcy is the emblem); Tesla, starting from the same sector in the same years, answered all seven.

This is the capstone skill of the Zero to One set — it operationalizes the others. Compose with monopoly-vs-competition (Q3 in depth) · zero-to-one-secrets (Q7 in depth) · last-mover-advantage (Q6 in depth) · definite-optimism (Q2's worldview) · contrarian-question (the interview form of Q7) · bullseye-traction-channels (Q5 in depth) · checklist (why written gates beat memory).

When to Use

Use when: deciding whether to start, fund, join, or seriously pivot a business; a plan is compelling on one axis (usually the tech or the TAM slide) and vague on the rest; preparing or evaluating a pitch and you want the holes found before an investor finds them; a previous venture failed "because of bad luck" and you want to know which questions were actually skipped; running an AI startup idea through a structured gate before building; user says "seven questions," "Thiel test," "is this idea any good," "stress-test my startup."

Skip when: the venture exists and the question is one dimension deep (a pricing change, one channel, one hire) — go straight to the dimension-specific skill; the bet is small and reversible (a weekend prototype, a landing-page test) where the gate costs more than the experiment; the user wants pitch polish, not a verdict on whether the business should exist.

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

Before running the test, read the user. Two delivery modes — pick one, don't default to dumping a finished scorecard.