What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Published in
3 min readSep 10, 2018
- “For anything desirable, there’s competition … A ticket to a championship game, the arm of an attractive man or woman, admission to a good college, and every solid professional opportunity.” ~ Reid Hoffman, The Startup of You
- Software is (still) eating the world: there are many industries that haven’t be disrupted by the digital revolution. eg. teaching/ed-tech, music / healthcare services are being delivered as online services. “…we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.” ~ Marc Andreessen, Why Software Is Eating the World
- The Internet still has as many secrets to give up as there are potential startups. Airbnb and Uber were founded around 2008/2009, almost a decade after the Dotcom crash.
- Frontier fields like Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics are overwhelming ripe with potential new discoveries or inventions, in comparison to humanities.
- Stanford University’s prestigious status was built up because Frederick Terman steered Stanford towards academic disciplines like biochemistry, statistics, aeronautics, which were likely to generate business opportunities or government grants (the military-industrial-academic complex) and away from dead-end fields like taxonomy or geography or classics. Facts are facts. Business opportunities from the study of Latin and Greek are painfully small. Why would Stanford direct its limited resources toward a field with such small potential payoff?
- Team and collaboration are a bigger predictor of success than any other variable. The lone genius in the basement will remain consigned to the dustbin of history.
- Bet on people rather than the idea.
- Resources are really important to execute and build out ideas. Eg. Nikola Tesla’s superior ideas in electricity and other fields lost to Thomas Edison and others, who had superior business sense. Tesla’s life is a cautionary tale. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, says: “I feel like he could’ve accomplished much more had he had more resources. I think that was a good lesson. I didn’t want to invent things, I also wanted to make the world better, and in order to do that, you need to do more than just invent things.”
- “Building a company is one of the most efficient ways in the world that you can kind of align the incentives of a lot of smart people, towards making a change,” Mark Zuckerberg, speaking to Facebook engineering teams in 2010.
- Raw intelligence is elusive. But raw intelligence trumps past experience.
- Programming has a multiplier effect when you creating something that people want. “The computer programmer, however, is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. …universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs. …They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behavior. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.” ~ Joseph Weizenbaum, Science and the Compulsive Programmer
- Great conceptions are worth little without precision execution.
- Great innovations are usually the result of ideas that flow from a large number of sources. ie. from multiple different disciplines. What may seem like creative leaps — the Eureka moment — are actually the result of an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies and engineering methods ripen together.
- ‘Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.’ ~ Andrew Grove, co-founder of Intel
