Why is this the Zuckerberg syndrome? Is he supposed to be a super-hacker? I thought he was more like a casual hacker marketing guy in the right place/right time.
Edit: From the article(I went back and reread it): "Reading HN for the pass 3 years, you come across smart if not brilliant "hacking" minds. People who build projects in a weekend that would take me months. I got sucked into the belief that unless I had unbelievable programming skills I will not be able to create anything worthwhile. I call it the Zuckerberg Syndrome."
After reading it again, I'm not sure what exactly the "syndrome" is here. Is it putting someone like Zuckerberg on a pedestal and thinking, "I can't match that so why try?" I think a lot people are affected by that sort of thinking in many facets of life. It's important to keep in mind that Facebook was NOT built in a day or weekend, for that matter. It took a lot of time.
Anyway, Mark is smart, but so are a lot of people. And Chris was the marketing guy who got the site in the Crimson with impressive frequency, not Mark.
I have met both. Again, they are both smart, but many people are smart. Many people who read Hacker News are technically capable of doing what each of them has done. Of those, very few were also able to benefit from a number of the external forces that supported each of them, and fewer still would actually want to do what each of them did.
So while they both may be quite intelligent people, they are not the most intelligent people ever to have lived, and are probably not even close. Being "brilliant" and being rich are not the same and there is no causal link in either direction!