The World Is Run By People No Smarter Than You
arclein
It's hard to know what to take from that; Steve Jobs was clearly a very smart man, without a lot of empathy for lesser beings. So is he saying "Everything was made up by people no smarter than Steve Jobs", or does he actually mean it that the average world/company/industry leader really is no smarter than you? And then I take a look at the clown show that has been tech in the past few weeks:Elon adding, and then removing, a second verified checkmark to replace the one he devalued, something any B2C product expert would know is a terrible idea Elon proposing a $20/month price for Twitter Blue, and then immediately dropping to $8 at the first celebrity pushback, something any pricing expert would know is a terrible idea
and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
It’s hard to know what to take from that; Steve Jobs was clearly a very smart man, without a lot of empathy for lesser beings. So is he saying “Everything was made up by people no smarter than Steve Jobs”, or does he actually mean it that the average world/company/industry leader really is no smarter than you?
And then I take a look at the clown show that has been tech in the past few weeks:Elon adding, and then removing, a second verified checkmark to replace the one he devalued, something any B2C product expert would know is a terrible idea
Elon proposing a $20/month price for Twitter Blue, and then immediately dropping to $8 at the first celebrity pushback, something any pricing expert would know is a terrible idea
Elon (or his EA?) personally reinterviewing engineers at Twitter and telling them to print out code and then changing his mind, something any engineering manager would know is a terrible idea
Zuck demoing Legs in Horizon VR that were faked, something any marketing manger would know is a terrible idea
Zuck spending $4b/quarter on the Metaverse entirely unproven, something any lean startup VC would know is a terrible idea
SBF going from one of the richest people on earth to filling Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in 1 week, and rediscovering the age old lesson on liquidity: ”when it rains, it pours” when it comes to financial stress correlations, something any bank manager or regulator learns in kindergarten
Even the Collison brothers, the philosopher kings of the Internet, made ”errors of judgment” about the slowdown and lost control of operating costs and so had to lay off 14% of staff, just like Tobi from Shopify. Stripe also fumbled their chances of pulling off one of the largest IPOs of all time by waiting too long, surely disillusioning an army of early employees.
Hindsight is 20-20, but many of these were probably avoidable mistakes. And I ack that you do have to be more risk-taking than the average bear to be as successful as these people in the first place.
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I tend to think . . .
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