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I realize first employees will tend to skew young and/or unsuccessful and, as a result of being first employees, these people have FU money, but my point is tha
by pw 10y ago
I realize first employees will tend to skew young and/or unsuccessful and, as a result of being first employees, these people have FU money, but my point is that their success seems to be kinda random. There's no sense of inevitability about their success like you see with really great founders. And it seems like they never go on to do anything amazing in their post-exit careers.
- elgenie 10y agoHow amazing is the post-exit career of the average great founder? What if the success of the "really great founders" similarly has quite a bit of randomness involved? The halo effect and associated myth-making doesn't get applied nearly as much to employee #1.
- pw 10y agoI feel like I've struck a nerve in some way and would love to better understand what's fueling your response. Why do you feel like you have to defend first employees?
- pw 10y agoI think you might have a point about the "post-exit career of the average great founder" in that it's usually not that impressive. Larry and Sergey certainly would qualify as "great founders", given their level of success, and, while they continue to run Google competently, they really haven't done anything else (Google still really only has one line of business, after all). Whereas on the other hand, we have someone like Bezos who, with AWS, has created not one, but two ten billion dollar plus businesses and whose ambition seems to be boundless. Or, of course, Elon.