January 2021 updates: (Autistic) visionaries are not natural-born leaders
Hello!
Writing
New post: (Autistic) visionaries are not natural-born leaders:
“Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were two young dudes without any experience at running a business who just started building computers in a garage and ended up turning Apple into a giant company”
“Elon Musk started Zip2 straight out of college and without any experience at running a business and turned it into a company that was sold for $300m just 3 years later”
“Larry Page and Sergey Brin were two CS grad students without any experience at running a business who hit on a great idea and ended up turning Google into a giant company. VCs made them hire Schmidt as the CEO of Google but Larry and Sergey were doing great by themselves”
These narratives create the impression that all the people mentioned above are not just visionaries who changed the world but that they were also natural-born leaders who magically knew how to run a company right from the moment of birth all by themselves and without help from anyone else.
In fact, they were all terrible at running a company and managing people when they were starting out. Had they been discouraged by the fact that they were terrible leaders who had no idea how to run a company or had they tried to do it all by themselves and without plenty of adult supervision, they would’ve probably never done anything of substance.
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Miscellaneous
I’m planning to move to the US and am working on my O-1 (extraordinary ability) visa application at the moment. If you manage any process that involves evaluating science funding proposals or manuscripts, you might be able to help me make my application stronger — please email alexey@guzey.com if you’d like to help
I went on Erik Torenberg’s Venture Stories podcast: Increasing Scientific Progress and Improving Institutions with Alexey Guzey
I discovered krisp (ref link, non-ref link) last month and it’s amazing. It cancels almost all background noise from the computer, keyboard, etc. during calls and makes mic input much clearer.
Tweet I keep thinking about: “My day job is to speak in an arcane snake language to a crystal vibrating at 3,000,000,000 cycles per second sitting in a cloud so that it can alter probabilities in the real world. If that isn't magic what is.”
Have a great February!
Cheers,
Alexey