The startup founder virus
I have stumbled upon a Reddit post talking about the experience of Y Combinator. About ludicrous growth, peer pressure and all that. Huge stress for an opportunity to “think bigger”.
You see, I do not wish to diminish the authors efforts, in fact any of the YC backed businesses. However, at the same time I feel like this culture is exactly part of the problem and why we cannot have good things.
Take AI for example: it didn’t come about because somebody poured billions upon billions in the field or through calculated effort. In fact, in a way all of the current AI companies are leeching off 50+ year old research. The research that has been done carefully by curious and passionate people. And those people were not curious or passionate about money.
Even Google itself hasn’t capitalised on the transformer architecture at first, even though their researchers literally came up with it.
The bootstrapping part is hard and is out of reach for most people–you have to be passionate and willing to sacrifice your own time, your life.
And when it pans out, there arrive the others–their interest is how to make a product out of it in the most monetarily efficient way possible.
It is almost as a virus that haunts people who want to make projects because they enjoy building and the converts them into money hungry, growth-at-all-costs craving zombies. Once again, I mean no disrespect, but in my opinion there must be balance. And most of the time in current culture it is broken.
It is this “kill or be killed” mentality which feels sensible on the surface, but in reality it undermines your own, personal progress as a human being.
So no, sorry, but I can’t see how surrounding yourself with rich people who throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks can “widen your vision”.
I have had my moments of widening vision and precisely all of them were about creating and invention, or studying something novel and fascinating to me. Never it was about thinking how to make a product that I can sell as many times as possible to as many people as possible.
It’s just too narrow of a vision for me.