First, the going out and away to slay dragons, which is unnatural, corresponding the to the conquest of scale.
And then there is the return—a homecoming-where one applies the transformative lessons to one’s more local and immediate life.
The journey is not complete without the “return”.
[0] the Camiroi in Lafferty's Primary Education of the... (1966) could presumably do everything alone, "do it yourself", but we're probably better to aim at small groups, ie "do it yourselves".
[1] centralisation vs decentralisation is a question of small N vs. large N, and actually small N isn't so bad on it's own, it's just that when N goes down to 1 or 2 it's just as likely to go all the way down to 0.
He definitely is. He was also a really nice person (I only knew him for a few years, before his stroke)
Dragons are good at amassing wealth because they know how to exploit economies of scale.
> after a successful stint at building things that do scale (or at least giving it a really good, long try), many people seem to gravitate towards building things that don’t scale.
Building systems that scale is very fun for me and I'd like to do more of it, but it's tough because customers couldn't care less how scalable we are, they just want, you know, the pesky stuff they paid for!
(BTW I think that PG essay is a product of a fading era in the Valley when your product could kind of stink and you could casually break every law you came across, and it just worked and you could just SCALE because blue oceans and free money abounded. A bunch of Valley crooks (sorry I mean luminaries) are still addicted to those halcyon days, writing books that are veiled manifestos for abolishing anti-trust law, and so on.)
> I have a theory that chasing things that scale makes you need therapy, and the therapy is pursuing things that can’t scale.
Again if anything it's the opposite for me. Actual businesses where you're keeping customers happy all day is hard, scaling systems is fun. I love tinkering with them on paper and then putting the changes out there and finding out if I was right or not, it's almost therapeutic. Maybe this is something of an engineer/introvert mindset, most programmers I know don't want to deal with real, messy customer concerns, they just want to build and optimize their perfect system.
> I once wrote that every entrepreneur’s dream is to succeed at building an impossibly hard business and then finally open a local coffee shop to be happy.
I always say that people with coffee shops or pretty much anything in F&B/hospitality/etc. have much harder businesses to run than I do. These are immensely difficult businesses with razor thin margins, you work tons of hours, customers may or may not be appreciative depending on the latest random Instagram post they saw etc. Like who wants to run a cafe instead of a nice technology business where you can literally sit around in your underwear, think about stuff, and then type it out and that's actually productive? These people who told Anu they want to run a cafe, what are they sick of? I wonder if it's just dystopian San Francisco tech culture, I understand why they'd be sick of that
> One extreme case in point: Zuck
Are we really taking this detour to read the tea leaves of Zuckerberg's public image and pretend that we have some real insights to his character? We know they're meaningless, this paragraph simultaneously observes that he's doing all this stuff like judo or whatever, but still grinding it out in the Facebook office, so I'm not sure why we even went there
I feel like this whole article only makes sense if you're steeped in a very narrow and specific tech culture which may never actually come again
So scaling here refers to conquering a market, beating down competitors, and, yes, building towering tech.
Other than that I agree with your criticisms.