Bill Gates was a raging asshole. Steve Jobs was a raging asshole. Larry Ellison was a raging asshole. It's not ideal, but it also doesn't preclude success.
For me it's the Cybertruck. If find it hard to reconcile that a person with his track record could come up with that absurd abomination (makes me think that there is small small chance that all his other achievements were just extreme luck and random chance. Well in reality it's probably it due to lack of pressure/constraints that forced him to focus on making rational cars previously).
On Reddit, mods of large subreddits like /r/news are permabanning people that just post an official SpaceX response and are censoring the comments. It's wild out there.
I'm perturbed by Elon's politics and hypocrisy, but this is absolutely not true in anywhere near the same timeframe.
So the real question is. Is there someone else with a similar or better drive then Musk, that is as smart as Musk, that has as much discipline, has the right personality and at the right time. The answer is much more likely to be no then yes in my opinion. Because if the answer is yes we would have another Musk or close to it.
We'll never know, though, because no bank or investor just hands out start-up capital to nobodies.
(I also happen to believe, and HN is going to hate this, that the high percentage of businesses that fail is a testament to how thoroughly misallocated capital is. So much capital goes to people who end up demonstrating they are incapable of deploying it. The trick that hasn't been solved yet is consistently finding who those many capable people are beforehand.)
Thiel is right about the indeterminate optimism and determinate optimism outlined in Zero to One. Many people just expect things will naturally get better, no need to actually do it yourself, that it will happen anyway. So it's funny that the things that need doing only get done by people that believe they need to do it. (practically all of the tech and company builders believe the Zero to One thesis)
Without Musk, what space industry would there have been? Blue Origin was a me-too a decade later. Virgin was a me-too failure. Boeing can't get their astronauts back right now. If you remove Musk, everything that's bad right now is delayed another decade.
Doesn't that disprove you previous hypothesis? Unless you think that the people who are handing out the money and the ones they are handing it to are somehow exceptionally incompetent?
Doesn't that disprove you previous hypothesis? Unless you think that the people who are handing out the money and the ones they are handing it to are somehow exceptionally incompetent? Why would that be the case?
Tech is also special in that it's often a winner takes all (to varying extents) market. A bunch of small/medium companies selling similar products usually can't survive long-term since geographic barriers aren't really a thing anymore.
So I simple don't think it's possible for 50-90% of all the companies were talking about to survive and grow at a pace that's fast enough for VCs. If they can't grow they'll will be outcompeted/bought out by companies that can't. Even if they can survive and grow at a modest pace long-term there is no point for VCs to invest into them.
I don't see how picking more competent people could significantly change this situation. They are all still competing for slices of the same even if that pie is constantly growing entrenched player with a lot of resources have a much better shot at capturing that growth than any newcomer.
> We'll never know because there is no counterfactual fund that invests in the companies nobody else invested in, to test whether they were false negatives.
I don't see how could that work unless VCs reduce the number of companies that they invest in by a magnitude or two.