> The companies where we were like ”woah, these folks are smart as hell” for the most part failed
Being clever, for the most part, almost never buys you anything. Building a cool product has nothing to do with being particularly smart, and scaling said product also rarely has much to do with being some kind of genius.
There's this pervasive Silicon Valley throughline of the mythical "10x engineer," mostly repeated by incompetent CEO/PM-types which haven't written a line of code in their lives. In reality, having a solid mission, knowing who your customer is, finding that perfect product market fit, and building something people love is really what building stuff is all about.
At the end of the day, all the bit-wrangling in the world is in service of that goal.
Depends on how you define smart. I worked at a place where income was directly tied to the quality of the ML models. Building what people love wouldn't have been the best strategy there.
Being clever, for the most part, almost never buys you anything. Building a cool product has nothing to do with being particularly smart, and scaling said product also rarely has much to do with being some kind of genius.
There's this pervasive Silicon Valley throughline of the mythical "10x engineer," mostly repeated by incompetent CEO/PM-types which haven't written a line of code in their lives. In reality, having a solid mission, knowing who your customer is, finding that perfect product market fit, and building something people love is really what building stuff is all about.
At the end of the day, all the bit-wrangling in the world is in service of that goal.