Timing Lessons

I think if you were to plot it as a graph it has a curve though.

Sure adding that 2nd smart person, the 8th smart person, etc., can add benefit and yield a whole which is greater than the sum of the individual parts in isolation. But once you are in the organization size range where you're adding a 500th person, a 10,000th person, then the organization almost always takes on other qualities and conditions: bureaucracy, slowing down, middle management, rules, paperwork, gossip, insulation from consumers/competition, groupthink, aversion to risk, and so on. And these qualities dumb it down. The "group brain" becomes much dumber than a smart brain when left alone and unfettered as an individual.

Google is a bit of an exceptional case where despite having on the OOM of 20k employees they don't seem to have quite succumbed to Big Dumb Company-itis. Surely they have some aspects of it, but they've tried hard to fight it and stay like a smaller/younger org.

I once dealt with a startup that was around 12 people and already I could see symptoms of Big Dumb Company start to manifest themselves.

well, with all due respect, you're not king of the world if you're the founder or co-founder of Xanga :)

A lot of scientists, interestingly, are willing to admit a luck factor, especially when it comes to doing something Nobel-Prize-level world-changing. Some really did know exactly what they were doing, and it worked. But a lot of scientists frankly admit that the big career-making thing they did wasn't even something they thought was important at the time--- and sometimes nobody else thought it was important either, and it languished in a journal for 10 years before someone else noticed it had big implications. Of course, that's not purely luck, because they'd never have had that opportunity to get their work belatedly discovered if they hadn't done good work on interesting problems, and published it. But there does seem to be some element of luck in the work turning out to be huge. There are plenty of people in exactly the same position who do good work on interesting problems, write a good journal article, and it doesn't turn out 10 years later to have unexpected but important implications, winning them the Nobel Prize. Just sort of how it happens; you can't always predict what is going to turn out to be important.

I could be wrong, but my impression is that wealthy businessmen are somewhat less willing to admit the role of luck than famous scientists are. Due to real differences in the role of luck in the two areas? Due to political considerations (the implications of admitting that wealth disparities aren't all due to merit are more political than the implications of admitting that scientific fame isn't purely due to merit)? Due to the self-deprecating scientists being humbler personalities? Dunno. And I could be wrong on the aggregate difference; I haven't done a survey or anything.

Luck is important, no doubt. But a)first you must follow your heart; b)you must do great work; and c)then you probably deserve some luck, too, and/or create your own luck.