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Comment by throw_128475 | Hacker News Reader

> Jepsen, whose background and resume could leave most people gasping, is one of tech’s true, long-haul, entrepreneurial visionaries.

AFAICT, Jepsen has been more of a seagull [1] than anything. The reality is... she's been a high profile participant in a series of short-term, failed endeavors -- from OLPC, Pixel Qi, a failed Google[x] project, and now a very short stint at FB. All of these failings are well documented on Wikipedia [2]. They sound good in principle, but have never delivered.

The MRI goal is laudable, and I hope for humanity's sake that it works. But I'd hold off on the admiration until it's more than vaporware -- especially with Jepsen at the helm.

Throw away account since I'm too close to her past endeavors to speak publicly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagull_manager

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lou_Jepsen

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I'd like to dismiss this as a little bit of jealous gossip, but the more I read the more it fits. Not to say the things she's done haven't been impressive but she seems like a person better at winning awards and having fanciful features written about her than creating really wide reaching impact. Many of these projects really strike me as a feel-good ideas that are much more beautiful to the wide-eyed technologist futurist types, than to the intended markets / consumers / world at large.

But yeah, I'd like nothing more than to be wrong on this. All of these ideas, if true to their promises would indeed be worth the "visionary" labels.

Reminded me of a couple of quotes from the book "Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat":

The maximum rate of promotion is achieved at a level of crisis only slightly less than that which results in dismissal

and

Innovative organizations abhor little failures but reward big ones

That's satire, of course, but makes sense. After some basic competence requirements are met, there is no way to figure out whether a moonshot project failed because it is inherently hard or as a consequence of the manager's incompetence. Manager of the failed moonshot thus becomes a very desirable hire - at least he or she has valuable experience in tackling hard projects!

So, in your estimation, what's an acceptable success rate for someone who only really works on moon shot ideas? I'm curious why you think she's a bellwether for failure as opposed to someone who is driven to take on world changing ideas.

If you're only going to say "I'm too close to her" and call her some bad things with an anon account, well, you probably just shouldn't have posted. I'm all for learning from the experiences people have interacting with the technocrati, but this post feels petty and lacks information.

"once, you're lucky. twice, you're good" could be a reasonable metric for execs who take on high risk projects.

They failed economically, though, not technically.

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