How what I do helps make the world a better place • Hacker News Board

Post by nostrademons » Fri, Oct 12, 2012, 12:52 AM UTC

snogglethorpe wrote: post #10

nostrademons wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a massive oversimplification that ignores that everyone who has changed the world had lots of help doing it. Larry and Sergey changed the world. I suspect that their path was significantly easier because they had help from Andy Bechtolsheim, John Doerr, and Michael Moritz - to say nothing of Craig Silverstein, Urs Hoezle, Amit Patel, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Paul Buchheit, Marissa Mayer, and the hundreds of…

Sure, but ... I think the main differentiator is the degree to which the help is generic —if person X could have been easily replaced by hundreds of others, X was probably not all that crucial to changing-the-world-process-Y even if they provided a great deal of assistance to Y. For instance, the people who made the food Larry and Sergey ate while hacking late all those nights, had a very direct effect on the creatio…

So, then you get into the question of how replaceable the founders are. For Google that's probably "not much", since there were some pretty big intuitive leaps that were non-obvious when they came out. Even then, however - a lot of people I know say that the inflection point in Google's success was when they hired Urs Hoezle as employee #9, because he had been through the process of architecting a massively-complex system before (he founded the startup that eventually became Java's HotSpot compiler).

But for Facebook - millions of programmers could have written Facebook as it existed in 2004. Mark Zuckerburg did, and he got the billions.

And Twitter - millions of programmers could have written Twitter as it existed in 2006. Jack Dorsey did, and he gets the reputation (and the paper billions).

And Instagram - millions of programmers could write Instagram. Kevin Systrom did. And he happened to know Adam D'Angelo, who introduced him to Marc Andreesen. Who was the critical link in the chain? Kevin, Adam, or Marc?