I almost want to say that it sounds like we should recruit people from the same demographic as good startup founders. Almost.
Per @aysja’s list, we want creative people with an unusually good ability to keep themselves on-track, who can fluently reason at several levels of abstraction, and who don’t believe in the EMH. This fits pretty well with the stereotype of a successful technical startup founder – an independent vision, an ability to think technically and translate that technical vision into a product customers would want (i. e., develop novel theory and carry it across the theory-practice gap), high resilience in the face of adversity, high agency, willingness to believe you can spot an exploitable pattern where no-one did, etc.
… Or, at least, that is the stereotype of a successful startup founder from Paul Graham’s essays. I expect that this idealized image diverges from reality in quite a few ways. (I haven’t been following Silicon Valley a lot, but from what I’ve seen, I’ve not been impressed with all the LLM and LLM-wrapper startups. Which made me develop quite a dim image of what a median startup actually looks like.)
Still, when picking whom to recruit, it might be useful to adopt some of the heuristics Y Combinator/Paul Graham (claim to) employ when picking which startup-founder candidates to support?
(Connor Leahy also makes a similar point here: that pursuing some ambitious non-templated vision in the real world is a good way to learn lessons that may double as insights regarding thorny philosophical problems.)
I almost want to say that it sounds like we should recruit people from the same demographic as good startup founders. Almost.
Per @aysja’s list, we want creative people with an unusually good ability to keep themselves on-track, who can fluently reason at several levels of abstraction, and who don’t believe in the EMH. This fits pretty well with the stereotype of a successful technical startup founder – an independent vision, an ability to think technically and translate that technical vision into a product customers would want (i. e., develop novel theory and carry it across the theory-practice gap), high resilience in the face of adversity, high agency, willingness to believe you can spot an exploitable pattern where no-one did, etc.
… Or, at least, that is the stereotype of a successful startup founder from Paul Graham’s essays. I expect that this idealized image diverges from reality in quite a few ways. (I haven’t been following Silicon Valley a lot, but from what I’ve seen, I’ve not been impressed with all the LLM and LLM-wrapper startups. Which made me develop quite a dim image of what a median startup actually looks like.)
Still, when picking whom to recruit, it might be useful to adopt some of the heuristics Y Combinator/Paul Graham (claim to) employ when picking which startup-founder candidates to support?
(Connor Leahy also makes a similar point here: that pursuing some ambitious non-templated vision in the real world is a good way to learn lessons that may double as insights regarding thorny philosophical problems.)