I think there are a whole bunch of inputs that determine a company’s success. Research direction, management culture, engineering culture, product direction, etc. To be a really successful startup you often just need to have exceptional vision on one or a small number of these inputs, possibly even just once or twice. I’d guess it’s exceedingly rare for a company to have leaders with consistently great vision across all the inputs that go into a company. Everything else will constantly revert towards local incentives. So, even in a company with top 1 percentile leadership vision quality, most things will still be messed up because of incentives most of the time.
I think there are a whole bunch of inputs that determine a company’s success. Research direction, management culture, engineering culture, product direction, etc. To be a really successful startup you often just need to have exceptional vision on one or a small number of these inputs, possibly even just once or twice. I’d guess it’s exceedingly rare for a company to have leaders with consistently great vision across all the inputs that go into a company. Everything else will constantly revert towards local incentives. So, even in a company with top 1 percentile leadership vision quality, most things will still be messed up because of incentives most of the time.