You Can't Predict Who Will Change The World

"...[people] cannot accept that skills and payoffs may have nothing to do with one another."

"We need more tinkering: uninhibited, aggressive, proud tinkering. We need to make our own luck. We can be scared and worried about the future, or we can look at it as a collection of happy surprises that lie outside the path of our imagination."

This is of course why we're all using a neighborhood DC power station provided by Edison Electric.

Nope, sorry, "random tinkering" will get you only so far.

Not so random tinkering can get you farther, it's no accident that about the most popular handgun design in the USA was made by John Browning (the greatest firearms design genius in history) and adopted by the US Army in 1911 (!). (We're also still using his M2 .50 cal machine gun with no real need to replace it, just as there was no real reason to replace the M1911.)

But if you combine "random tinkering" with "European math" (i.e. Tesla and the polyphase AC that Edison could not do the math for), now, there you really have something.

When I read some histories of the founding concepts of MIT, it was very clear they desired to meld these two powerful themes into something new, the motto Mens et Manus (Mind and Hand) and the seal expressing this quite clearly.

And while I understand that a lot of you all who are focused on a niche that richly rewards "random tinkering" don't think there's much value add to e.g. the sorts of engineers that MIT turns out, I submit to you that you wouldn't be here unless you were standing on the shoulders of the people who produced artifacts like the transistor, the IC and TCP/IP (and maybe even ACID databases :-), none of which were pure "random tinkering".

To recast this a bit, maybe look at it through Clayton Christensen's lens:

The transistor, IC and TCP/IP were all sustaining innovations, replacing the tube, mechanically integrated modules and previous networking systems respectively. Each dropped right into the place of their predecessors with the usual teething pains, but represented qualitative improvements that in a while were game changers.

What you are doing is disruptive innovation at its finest (read The Innovator's Dilemma for the full treatment).

There's a place for both, but I believe that while what one is working on might strongly emphasize one or the other, one should be reasonably grounded in both.

Otherwise you might find your lunch eaten by a disruptive innovation, or hit a brick wall when you're in the sustaining axis and e.g. something doesn't scale in an important way.

(And I thank keaneu for reminding why I dropped my subscription to Forbes a long time ago (before SCO vs. The World). :-)

You can probably say with some degree of certainty, which people won't do anything big. That might still leave a pretty large group of people, though.

Who else thinks it would be a lot of fun to see a Graham-Taleb debate on startups? In the end, I think he'd probably like what YC does, because you're giving some people the freedom to "tinker" full time, along with the support to take advantage of the tinkering if it produces something cool. Given a non-infinite supply of money and attention time, of course you're going to have to pick and choose who gets those things. I wonder if he would suggest any changes to the format?

"The only bad news is that we can't really tell where the good news are going to be about, except that we can locate it in specific locations, those with a high number of trials. More tinkering equals more Black Swans. Go look for the tinkerers."

http://edge.org/q2007/q07_5.html#taleb

The Forbes article is basically just the edge answer minus a few paragraphs, although sadly the paragraphs that got cut were the ones that would probably be most interesting to YC types.

As for this article the only interesting thing said to was "Ignore what you were told by your college economics professor". I agree with this because economist have this notion that theory comes before practice. Often you will see abstract mathematical theories developed first, then secondly attempts to execute then in the world afterwards. Common sense should tell anyone it is the other way around.Successful execution preceeds any good theory.

This is essentially Taleb's point about trial and error, though if you follow that point religiously you end up adopting the concept that theories are of no worth at all, since everything can be reduced down to luck.

In the end even if that maybe true, I still think the idea of things being reducable to luck is a wrong way to approach the challenges that you will face with life. You start to say after this startup failed..."well i was just unlucky", when in fact you should reflect and make sense of your mistakes, rather then just playing it down to some mysterious luck hypothesis that you had no way of influencing.