Comment by hindsightbias
6 years ago
Stories like this are really a dime a dozen. Marc Andreesen and the founders of Tivoli both worked in the same IBM dept. I met Michael Dell when he was building systems in his dorm. So did a thousand other people. Anyone who got in early at Dell got ground into the pulp years before there was a huge payoff. Even those who survived had to wait 10 years. The trick is finding new tech where people are taking risks. Anybody who went to a NeXTWorld Expo could have partied with John Parry Barlow, Tevanian, Kawasaki, Draper, etc.
There are probably a thousand classmates of Larry, Sergey and Mark who are just "getting by" at $200K/year. Get out there, mingle, take risks, fail and look for the edges. That's where you'll find the famous people of 2025 or 2030.
This is a great reminder. I was impressed by the recent documentary "General Magic" by how much smart people seem to congregate around new ideas. The old Mac team was the same one trying to create the smartphone 10 years before it was possible, and it was that core of folks who ended up doing it at Apple and Android later anyway.
I saw the documentary and enjoyed it. But finding that company in 2019 seems harder. That said, I perhaps I'm not seeing it -- how do you find that company of today?
There are thousands of start-ups in their A round right now. A bit less in their B round. Which is going to be Apple of 2040? Which will be the Google of 2030? Which will be the Stripe of 2025?
It is like one of those quotes "if you purchased gold in 2002 and sold in 2009, you'd have a 400% return" -- works well when you know in hindsight that 2002 was a long-time low and 2009 a long-time high.
This is less difficult than you're implying. It's true that selecting the Stripe of 2025 is difficult; you need to pick between companies that are only 3 years old. Similarly, if you want to select the Google of 2040, you would need to pick between a bunch of companies working out of their friends' garages, and that would not be easy. But to select the Google of 2030, you need to look at companies which:
1. Are about 10 years old.
2. Are close to IPO (Google was already 4 years post-IPO when it was 10 years old, but IPO timing has changed since then).
3. Have market fit with multiple products (Google had Gmail, Maps, and Chrome already when it was 10 years old).
4. Are still founder-led.
To select the Apple of 2040, you need to look at companies which:
1. Are about 20 years old.
2. Are about 10 years past IPO (again, Apple IPO'd 4 years after its founding, but the same company today would probably IPO a bit later)
3. Are still actively innovating, and launching successful new products.
4. Are still founder-led.
These companies exist, and they have been substantially de-risked relative to the 3 year-old startups. Engineers that join them today will have similar financial outcomes to those that joined Google in 2008, or Apple in 1996.
I really want to believe you, because that means I could also end up rubbing shoulders with Thiel, Andreesen, and their crew at will.
But what you are saying seems to be cherry-picked examples, how does one do this without knowledge of the future?
We dont know who the future Andreesen will be, we dont know which one of thousands of groups/departments/companies they will work at, so where do you go work (assuming it were that easy to just choose a company+department+group at will.)
The population of innovation is a sliver of subset of the engineering/CS/AI community. UI-Urbana (Andreesen), Stanford (Page/Brin), Harvard (Zuck), etc, etc. That gets you down to a couple of 1000 people or so. The size of an American High School.
You don't have to see the future, you just have to know where those working on it are and meet enough of them. They're in places like a Supercompute booth or MIT poster session trying to tell you. They may not have The Big Idea yet, but talent tends to stand out.
Andreesen didn't randomly pick an IBM group. He picked one doing Unix distributed system management and virtualization 25 years ago. I didn't have foresight to make the same choice, it just seemed obviously interesting and there were only three major players in that space.