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Why do we have not so many great individual players anymore but great teams? Is our rate of progress and build slowing down? Can the brilliance of an individual

Why do we have not so many great individual players anymore but great teams? Is our rate of progress and build slowing down? Can the brilliance of an individual overshadow big tech? Why did we have the best quarter in growth for public companies and why is it taking longer private companies to go public? More than ambition the rules of the game and the frontier has now changed. I don't think ambitious people don't exist - they just realize this is better realized by being within a larger ecosystem and having influence rather than building everything around oneself. Would we say Hinton was ambitious? Did he have sufficient impact?

ankit219 3y ago
Ambitions are mostly defined by external stimuli, that is what does a society value? Value not in terms of the actual praise, but what are the things they keep talking about. If we look at it from a narrow definition of tech, we realize there aren't many ambitious individual players. The premise becomes hard to justify if we were to include so many teenagers on insta/tiktok/twitch getting a lot of following and making content individually (where in the past it take a full crew to make such stuff) and newer creators wanting to join that club. I think many people are still ambitious. Just that (for quite a few people) their ambition is no longer to work 10 years to build an everlasting company, or do original research to get themselves a nobel, but just to gain the fame and following that comes with social media. In an abstract sense, for a select set, the end goal of ambition was the adulation and fame you got after doing your thing well. Of course, there is another set where ambition is to build a lasting thing and they continue to work towards that. Just that former set outnumbers the latter easily, and it's never easier for that set to achieve their goal.
mlinsey 3y ago
"Why do we have not so many great individual players anymore but great teams? " IMO this hasn't changed as much as it seems from the outside. The brilliant individual leaders of the past owed most of their success to their team members, and most high-functioning teams today, if you study how they work internally, do actually have a key leader who is aligning everyone around a shared vision. What's changed is that it's no longer seen as a positive to boost the profile of the leader too far the rest of the team.

ankit219 3y ago

Ambitions are mostly defined by external stimuli, that is what does a society value? Value not in terms of the actual praise, but what are the things they keep talking about. If we look at it from a narrow definition of tech, we realize there aren't many ambitious individual players. The premise becomes hard to justify if we were to include so many teenagers on insta/tiktok/twitch getting a lot of following and making content individually (where in the past it take a full crew to make such stuff) and newer creators wanting to join that club. I think many people are still ambitious. Just that (for quite a few people) their ambition is no longer to work 10 years to build an everlasting company, or do original research to get themselves a nobel, but just to gain the fame and following that comes with social media. In an abstract sense, for a select set, the end goal of ambition was the adulation and fame you got after doing your thing well. Of course, there is another set where ambition is to build a lasting thing and they continue to work towards that. Just that former set outnumbers the latter easily, and it's never easier for that set to achieve their goal.

mlinsey 3y ago

"Why do we have not so many great individual players anymore but great teams? " IMO this hasn't changed as much as it seems from the outside. The brilliant individual leaders of the past owed most of their success to their team members, and most high-functioning teams today, if you study how they work internally, do actually have a key leader who is aligning everyone around a shared vision. What's changed is that it's no longer seen as a positive to boost the profile of the leader too far the rest of the team.