51–60 of 188 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Translation: why don't many normal people have trust funds, expensive educations, the disposable income and lack of financial responsibilities to be able to work for free for extended periods of time, friends in industry, investor class connections, or some combination of all of the above plus a shitload of luck.
If those things are required, then why do so many immigrants become entrepreneurs?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So why don't many normal people successfully grow a business?
Lack of an idea is the main obstacle for me. My best business idea so far has only produced about $20k/y of sales.
The people who work with me describe me as a visionary CEO.
If you want to end the cult of the CEO, why don't you introduce me to another visionary of my caliber - because there aren't any in my organization.
I assign inventions to my cofounders: "Invent this. This is the requirement."
They come back with nothing. Why? Because they're not a visionary CEO, I am. Why can I invent something meeting the requirements, but they not only can't come up with the requirements to begin with, but when handed the requirements, can't invent something that meets those requirements? (Leaving me to do so.)
The visionary CEO is not over. The reason it is not over is because there is nobody you can introduce me to who will come work with me as another visionary. They exist, of course. Elon Musk is one of them.
What do you think the chances are that I can get Musk to join my board?
Made as a throwaway because even in this crowd it is rare to acknowledge what other people repeatedly call visionary intelligence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And do you think only the CEO deserves credit for when this happens?
Obviously it'll depend. But if a founder/CEO turns a 3-person startup into a 500-person multimillion dollar company within a year or 2, and is responsible for a lot of that effort, then they arguably deserve the bulk of the credit. In most cases, probably 10% or less of the credit belongs to the CEO, though.
If I found a company and directly hire 10 people and act as a day-to-day leader where everyone reports to me, you can say that I had a large impact on everything that happened.
Two years later, when we have 300 people, I'm out of the day-to-day hiring decisions and I'm not directly making all the deals that the company makes, I can still claim to be steering the ship, but I can't claim direct credit for much of what the company does. Sure, it was my initial founding decision that has made all of it possible, but I'd be incapable of being involved in literally everything at a larger scale such that I could take credit for it.
This is reminiscent of auteur theory in film, which essentially says that the director is the author of the film. Similar to corporations, making a movie requires a lot of people with different skills/talent. The director overshadows everyone and is the person primarily credited with authoring a film, they even overshadow the writers of the screenplay. One of the leading arguments for auteur theory is that the direct…
It's older than that, how many innovations are credited to Emperors, and victories in battle to Generals? I think it must be the product of some parts of human nature.
Please, how often do you see anything credited to more than 10 people, even though maybe thousands worked on it?
It's human nature to look for the leader, or leaders if there's no clear leader or if that seen leader is actively advertising the others, but no one will ever credit 100+ people actually working on anything.
A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unpack grit and you're left with psychological traits which many normal people have.
So why don't many normal people successfully grow a business?
The only time one would endeavor to run a massive business rather than a small one is if you invented/patented something or provided a service that can be scaled and you need help to bootstrap it... in which case unless BillG or DonaldT is yer uncle, you're gonna be sucking on some VC's titty anyway... i. e. they own you.
I'm sure the majority of the article is valid, but Apple's stock skyrocketed after Job's death. I'm sure it's an outlier but kind of wish that had been acknowledged given the image used.
It was fairly well known for months before Jobs' death that he was ill, and that he wasn't very involved in the day-to-day operations of Apple anymore, and that Tim Cook was clearly going to be his successor, and had already taken on many if not most of the CEO's duties.
Even then, AAPL dipped a little during Oct 2011 (Jobs died on Oct 5th), recovered in November, and then started really moving upward over the next 2-3 months. I think the large jump can be attributed to how well and how successfully they handled the transition, and to the point that people -- as much as they viewed Jobs as key to the company's success -- realized that Apple could still perform well without him, based on the idea that the "cult of Jobs" didn't end with his death.
The way I look at it, there are two kinds of CEOs. There are the ones that founded the company and have led the company according to their own personal vision. Many of them hold stock worth billions and they're generally looked up to as "captains of industry". The other kind is the CEO who is hired by the board of directors. They're usually very well paid and given a lot of stock, but aren't wealthy the way, say, Bil…
When you hire someone, whether to mow your lawn or run your fortune 500 company, you want their work effort to be aligned with you objectives. Ideally, every employee you hire is aligned with your interest, but that is impossible. This is a hard problem with a huge body of research behind it. If you would like to learn more, look up the "agency problem".
With regard to the ability to easily change investments - that is simply not true for the massive companies you are talking about. As an individual investor, you can shift capital around easily because your decisions have a negligible impact on the market as a whole. However, over 70% of the stock market is held by institutional investors, whose decisions significantly impact market prices.
Stock prices reflect the long term prospects of a company. Shareholders are merciless in punishing companies that optimize for the short term over the long term.