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This is the realization that has led me to prefer working for a big software company over entrepreneurship in the past few years. Unless you find the problem of entrepreneurship interesting in and of itself, it is very unlikely the projects you will be working on as an entrepreneur will be nearly as technically interesting as the kinds of work you'll be doing at a company working on a large scale product. It's unfortunate, entrepreneurship sounds more interesting than being a cog in a big machine, but in practice I think it usually isn't for technically minded people.



Isn’t that the same problem endemic at Google? How many failed messaging platforms for instance has Google had because everyone wanted to work on a new problem instead of iterating on the existing one?

After over two decades, despite all of its attempts, Google has yet to do anything successful that wasn’t advertising based.

No Android doesn’t count. It came out in the Oracle trial that Google had only made $24 billion in profit on Android from its inception until the beginning of the trial. I’m the meantime they pay Apple $8 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS devices. Apple has madd more in mobile from Google than Google has made from Android.


Hmm, your reply went in a direction I very much didn't expect, though I can see where you're coming from if I squint.

What I called technically interesting is "working on a large scale product", which for you seems to have implied "work on a new problem", but for me it's exactly the opposite. The kinds of large scale projects I find the most technically interesting are long into their growth curve.




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