Don’t really agree with this generalization to business and startups. Mathematics/theoretical physics and “prestige” writing are possibly the two single most f

Don’t really agree with this generalization to business and startups. Mathematics/theoretical physics and “prestige” writing are possibly the two single most fields in which a single person working by themselves can, and often does, produce something of tremendous value. So yes, they are filled with “rogue genius visionaries” who channeled their creativity into something great. Running a business is not like that at all. It’s pretty rare for any business, even in software, to be able to directly attribute its success to one immensely valuable insight or innovation. And even if it could, the actual work of building a business around that innovation IMO doesn’t require a particularly innovative environment for the line staff. Take Google - hugely profitable, most of its success stems from creating two innovative things (good web search, and auctioned search ads). Pagerank was not even new when Google was founded and the idea itself was easily replicated elsewhere. Google was successful because they just searched the thing you wanted quickly with no BS compared to their competitors shoving portal garbage in your face and lazily linking to curated indices of keywords - by the time their competitors got their shit together Google had all the usage to use search outcomes (hit back, researched with similar terms) to improve their algorithm, and shortly thereafter and was already executing on CAC strategies (some of which like android and chrome are arguably a third innovation, though I assert any search giant would be smart enough to pursue these, and indeed MS did). Though they had an image of a smart person’s playground, and did have such a huge money spigot they lived up to it for a while, I think it was their execution on search and really smart investments in early products (search ads, ad networks, gmail, YouTube, chrome, android) that made them successful. And you can see the same with many “deep tech” businesses: OpenAI commercialized LLMS that were researched and developed a lot elsewhere by launching the first public, tuned version of it and using that to tune an even better product. Amazon basically executed the most boring idea possible “a shop on the web” into a hugely efficient everything store. Snowflake, databricks, the flavor of the month DB company are repackaging the same boring stuff into things that are simple and easy to use. None of these take rogue geniuses. I think the advantage funded startups (especially the ones that grow into giants) have over hacker houses is they aren’t to nearly the same extent operating as social clubs. It’s not so much deep work and rogue geniuses as just having a culture of work to begin with, actually executing on things instead of trying to relive your frat days, cutting deadweight instead of letting them be ideas guys.