I think pg is falling prey to the whole post-hoc founder story phenomenon here. He sees so many startups, he hears so many stories about them, and he works har

I think pg is falling prey to the whole post-hoc founder story phenomenon here. He sees so many startups, he hears so many stories about them, and he works hard to distill it into some kind of actionable and scalable investment strategy. The problem is that the facts which led to the success of the business are not the same thing as the best insights a founder can come up with about why it succeeded. The latter is subject to an incredible amount of confirmation bias and the simple desire to tell a good story—in fact you have to do that to get investment. In reality, novelty of ideas is meaningless, because the massively overwhelming majority of ideas in the world never get executed on. Even within contexts where people and companies have the means, most ideas—even good ones—don't get executed on because they conflict with other ideas and don't win the battle for resources. What matters for an idea is execution and context. If you bring the right resources: skills, connections, go-to-market strategy, smaller supporting ideas, and it gels with the current zeitgeist of whatever market you are in, then it can get some traction. From there you learn and gain more insights which can be leveraged to scale up. You do this over and over again, and if you are lucky you can make an 8, 9, 10-figure company. By the time all this happens you'll have some tremendous insights, but they will be specific to the context in which they were gleaned. The "generality" we observe of these insights is just a result of our pattern-matching and story-telling brains. The "surprisingness" comes after the fact to varying degrees based on existing preconceptions and perhaps how the world has changed over time. In other words, I don't think there is such a thing as a hugely valuable insight per se, rather this: we have insights, we believe in them to varying degrees, and based on how well it maps to our actions and their results, we later declare the "value" of the insight.