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Pixar has the same bottleneck problem they had at Disney during their feature era - there were "nine old men" established as the (supervising) animators and har
by zach 19y ago
Pixar has the same bottleneck problem they had at Disney during their feature era - there were "nine old men" established as the (supervising) animators and hardly any room for anyone else. Just like Pixar may have no room to let Doug Sweetland direct a fantastic movie, John Hubley saw limited opportunity at Disney, so he founded the animation startup UPA.
Anyway, it brings up the issue of what I'm going to call superlearning environments. The kind of places that become legendary because of the seemingly unbelievable concentration of talent. For animation, the late-70's Disney training program. For 3D graphics, anywhere Ed Catmull has been. For console games, I'd actually say Virgin Interactive Entertainment, which none of you have heard of.
These kind of environments are hard to discover unless you happen upon them and are blown away by the level of talent involved. But YC is most fascinating to me because it's a continuing (although periodic) experiment in creating one of these environments that's freestanding.
And this kind of environment is exactly what you don't get in a lonely startup. I know this all too well -- it's great to spend time with your co-founders, but I'd always worked with people significantly smarter and wiser than myself and it is absolutely the number one thing I miss.
- Prrometheus 19y ago>These kind of environments are hard to discover unless you happen upon them and are blown away by the level of talent involved. But YC is most fascinating to me because it's a continuing (although periodic) experiment in creating one of these environments that's freestanding. YC is fascinating to me because it is a conscious attempt to form these environments. Historically, most of the great learning/building groups seem to have come about by accident.