Because creating a self-driving car is an extremely creativity-intensive exercise that demands "smartness"... but smartness doesn't add linearly (or, I could po

Because creating a self-driving car is an extremely creativity-intensive exercise that demands "smartness"... but smartness doesn't add linearly (or, I could posit even monotonically). If 1 smart guy can produce 1 self-driving car in say 6 months, it doesn't mean 2 smart guys can produce a self-driving in 3 months. Once you have a bunch of people, 2nd order and third order interactions between us get complicated and managing that becomes its own time/money-sink. As for money, yes, it can accelerate growth in its first-order effect; but it also induces stress and so threatens early exhaustion of your other precious resource: personal motivation. So, as a crack-shot programmer, if you know with 90% certainty you can crank out a self-driving car in 6 months by yourself or fail, but only 20% certainty you can arrange a cohesive team with someone else's money to crank out a car in 1 month or fail (and alienate your team, and ruin your credit)... I would advise taking the 6 months route. Patience is a virtue and sometimes it's better not buying into every pot of snake-oil the SV hype machine wants to sell us.