The Founders
This quote by Elon Musk, who was CEO of PayPal before being outsted, is as good of an explanation for their success as anything.
There was a high bar for talent, and you were expected to make quick, bold decisions.
This was a good book if you wanted to learn about the history of PayPal, or perhaps some of the players like Max Levchin and Peter Thiel.
Perhaps this is a case of "now is not the right time". Returning to this book in a few years may yield some new insights, or perhaps I will have had more time to digest the ones I already read. But the largest "insights" are ones which have already been spread so much and have become so memetic to the internet startup industry, I find the nomenclature to be generous.
Either way- it is encouraging to think about Musk's point of view with the scaling of artificial intelligence. Too much have I been not doing things myself. AI in various forms have been giving the first swipe at the situation. Sure, I come in and make some edits afterwords. I may even make some good edits. But the trial, error, and learning that comes from doing the hard thing with your own two hands has started to slip.
Charting my programming skills would look pitiful. Last year it was a steep slope, this year, less so. The same can be said with cooking. Perhaps this year I am a better cook in terms of the food which is produced. But the craft of cooking itself has been dulled. Last year, my forte was in saving dishes. Mess something up and I could look around a sparse kitchen, make the requisite cure, and apply it to the now-scrumshus morsel.
This has been avoided with using different artifical models. They give clear instructions, dummed down so not even I can make a mistake. And as they say, and ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
To rectify this, I will need to start making mistakes again. The reduction of mistakes in my life has means I am not doing hard things. Either "I" am not doing them. Or the things are not hard. So, back to the drawing board to start doing hard things, failing, iterating, learning, and pushing myself to continue on the road to mastery.
For a concrete example, my next hurdle in cooking is presentation. The food being good isn't enough anymore. It now needs to look good.
§Some quotes I liked
"At one point, the company's office featured both an indicator called 'The World Domination Index,' which tracked the day's users, and a banner bearing the words "Memento Mori,"
"This notion of you can tell a machine to do things in the future that you're only going to know about later on was this profound realization"
"'But what does it do? What purpose does it serve?' Banister asked. 'What do you mean? It's beautiful...I don't know why. It's cool?'"
"Nosek winkingly referred to these gatherings as the 'billionaire's breakfast club.' 'We all believed that the others were going to build big things'"
"To fill their empty Rolodex, they started cold-calling people they read about in the newspaper"
"At Google, you're a cog. Whereas with me, you're an instrumental piece of this great thing that we'll build together"
"In Confinity's early days, Levchin observed that the number of people in a room correlated positively to friction in basic communication"
"If you can't tell me the four ways you fucked something up...before you got it right, you probably weren't the person who worked on it"
"If there were two paths where we had to choose one thing or the other...we would just pick one and do it...oftentimes it's better to just pick a path and do it rather than just vacillate endlessly on the choice"