Anna Karenina the famous 1878 novel by Leo Tolstoy is Lec 1 in a Retarded and Gay Guys Lecture Series cs 183

### The Anna Karenina Metaphor in Peter Thiel’s CS 183

It looks like there may be a slight misspelling or autocorrect error in your query—”Anna Carina” is almost certainly referring to **Anna Karenina**, the famous 1878 novel by Leo Tolstoy. Peter Thiel frequently references its famous opening line (“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”) as a metaphor for business and startups. Peter Thiel adapts it to argue that **all successful companies are different** (each solving a unique “0 to 1” innovation problem in their own way), while **all failed companies are alike** (often due to common pitfalls like poor execution, lack of differentiation, or copying others—echoing the “Anna Karenina principle” from biology and decision theory, where success requires succeeding on multiple fronts, but failure can happen via any one).

This isn’t a full-blown “metaphor lecture,” but it’s a core idea Thiel weaves throughout the course, drawing from Tolstoy to illustrate contrarian thinking and definite optimism in startups.

#### Where It Appears

– **Primary Location in CS 183**: The explicit reference and channeling of the metaphor first appears in **Lecture 1** (“The Challenge of the Future”), in Blake Masters’ notes. Here’s the direct quote from the notes:

  > “But at some point you have to go from 0 to 1—you have to do something important and do it right—and that can’t be taught. Channeling Tolstoy’s intro to *Anna Karenina*, all successful companies are different; they figured out the 0 to 1 problem in different ways.”<grok:render card_id=”2f29cc” card_type=”citation_card” type=”render_inline_citation”>

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  This sets up the course’s central theme: globalization (copying/copying 1 to n) vs. true progress (creating from 0 to 1), with the metaphor underscoring why most startups fail uniformly while successes are uniquely innovative.

– **In the Book *Zero to One***: This idea evolved into the opening chapter of Thiel’s 2014 book *Zero to One* (co-written with Blake Masters, based directly on CS 183 notes). The first chapter is titled “**The Challenge of the Future**” (mirroring Lecture 1) and flips Tolstoy’s line explicitly:

  > “Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. […] As you craft a unique path to the future, the first step is to recognize that the old playbook is not a playbook at all—it’s a straitjacket. […] Tolstoy’s famous opening line to *Anna Karenina* provides a template: **’All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’** […] In business, too, **every company is unhappy in its own way**, but **all happy companies are different**—each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. […] So you must either make something better than anyone else (a 1 to n innovation) or create something entirely new (a 0 to 1 innovation).”<grok:render card_id=”7b8153″ card_type=”citation_card” type=”render_inline_citation”>

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#### Is It Lecture 17 via Blake Masters’ Notes?

No, not Lecture 17. That lecture (“Deep Thought”) focuses on artificial intelligence—its scale, strangeness, economic opportunities, regulatory freedom, and comparisons to biotech. There’s no mention of *Anna Karenina*, Tolstoy, or related metaphors for success/failure in startups (or anything similar). The notes discuss AI’s potential to surpass human intelligence, trade paradigms (Ricardo vs. Luddite), hidden limits like code complexity, and why AI might be a better bet than biotech right now. No Tolstoy reference appears.<grok:render card_id=”898bdc” card_type=”citation_card” type=”render_inline_citation”>

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If this isn’t the reference you meant (e.g., if “Anna Carina” refers to something else like the actress Anna Karina from Jean-Luc Godard’s films, whom Thiel has occasionally name-dropped in contrarian culture discussions but not as a core metaphor in CS 183), feel free to clarify! You can read the full Blake Masters notes archive 

https://blakemasters.tumblr.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup or watch the Larry Chiang lecture videos on YouTube for context.

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