You'd be surprised how many "scale-up"'s are owned by genuine idiots. I don't even mean inexperienced people, just people that - if you were to meet them for the first time - seem like they are fucking idiots. The type that recently figured out you can tie your shoe instead of tripping over them.
Those people own a yacht, a big house, all that stuff. I don't know how they do it. Is it incompetence, is it unwillingness? are they retarded? we'll never know...
>I don't know how they do it.
They are too dumb to not be confident. Plenty of confident dumb people are poor and try get rich quick schemes. Occasionally some of them work, and now you have a dumb business owner.
Yes.
If you're 10/10 smart, you're getting a 7 figure sign on bonus to go work at Meta as an AI researcher.
If you're 6-9/10 smart, you're probably miserable somewhere.
If you're 4-5/10 smart, you are one of these people.
Why do you feel the need to simplify life into such a narrow perspective? While it's true that being smart can limit your confidence, what you've written is beyond exaggeration. There is so much more complexity involved.
There is some insight to his post. If you're very intelligent, there are many points in your life that steer you away from starting your own company. If at any point the best option you have is to start a company, you were probably not a very good student or employee.
This is largely my experience as well. The Bay Area wannabe startup crowd is brimming with idiots, people dumber than your dumbest colleague at work. Unbelievable amounts of Dunning-Kruger.
The actual grind filters out most of them, of course, but if you concede that some businesses are basically luck then some number of those idiots will make it.
HN mindset distilled in one comment.
Thanks. I'm going to take that as a compliment.
HN positivity distilled in one reply.
HN self-loathing distilled in a pointless thread.
so… they’re conmen
confidence man
Flowers for Algernon has something to say about this.
So Silicon Valley's big-head is based on an actual stereotype?
Yeah, except that Big Head was, as far as I understood, just sleepwalking or floating through life. He more or less wholly lacked that unquenchable thirst for money that motivates MBA frat boys to yell at balding beta cucks to type the code faster before AI replaces them...