Been thinking again about Sam Altman’s comments on co-working spaces, at the tail end of his Conversations With Tyler podcast: conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-a
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It’s an interesting combination of a few obvious ideas:
1. Most (smart) people are mimetic.
2. You are the average of the 5 closest people around you.
3. Great ideas are fragile.
4. So … great ideas get crushed when you put a sufficiently large group of smart people together.
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I remember walking into an ‘incubator-with-coworking space’ three years ago (I won’t say which one, but it’s still running and is somewhat respected in SG) and realising that much of its pitch is “come join a community of smart ambitious people; startups aren’t so scary!” …
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And I remember thinking “well, if you need the safety of a community to start a company … maybe you shouldn’t?”
But like I said, they seem to be doing well, what do I know? 🤷♂️
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I think the most interesting thing about that is the Chesterton's fence reminder.
The rest to me are... "Funding ideas at scale" views which are largely not relevant to bootstrappers.
I.e. it's probably bad to have a "great idea" as a bootstrappers.
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Well, bootstrapping is a ‘bad idea’ in such circles (they’ll disparage it by saying “it’s not ambitious enough” because they optimise for ambitious-sounding but legibly plausible ideas), so it’s probably best not to hang out there. ;-)
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Ppl misuse the "avg of 5 ppl around you" thing a lot! Bad to be around 5 smart ppl. You want to be around a super smart person, a super kind person, a super extroverted person, etc
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Maybe that’s the real reason why you shouldn’t share your ideas/goals early on. You might just have the next Airbnb but when you tell people you are offering an air mattress and cereal for breakfast to people looking for a room for a few days they won’t laugh at you
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