17 ms·

Great Founder Theory (2020)

61 points by haneefmubarak 3y ago

__loam 3y ago
It's absolutely incredible to see someone take the Great Man Theory, something that has been greatly criticized in historical circles, and apply a tech bro bullshit veneer to it to pass it off as some new and amazing thought worth sharing with everyone. Here's my own Great Founder Theory: I don't think founders matter nearly as much as people in Silicon Valley think they do. They're basically there to give VCs a figure head they can point to and claim some new effort to financialize and monopolize another part of our economy is backed by some brilliant ass hole they found somewhere who started this thing in their garage. There have of course been very intelligent and hard working founders, but imo whether your startup succeeds has much more to do with product market fit and timing than it does with the quality of the founder. Just look at what a shitheel uber had at the beginning.
- flimsypremise 3y ago
  Hah, came here to post basically this. One of the clearest illustrations of what I call Silicon Valley Brain.
- gniv 3y ago
  > They're basically there to give VCs a figure head they can point to and claim some new effort to financialize and monopolize another part of our economy is backed by some brilliant ass hole they found somewhere who started this thing in their garage. There have of course been very intelligent and hard working founders, but imo whether your startup succeeds has much more to do with product market fit and timing than it does with the quality of the founder. This reads funny to me since unwittingly you seem to agree to the Great Founder Theory. Product market fit is hard to come by but is relatively easy to recognize. This is the role of VCs. You try to argue that founders are interchangeable but I don’t see it. If anything, VCs are more interchangeable.
- ac2u 3y ago
  >to pass it off as some new and amazing thought worth sharing with everyone The linked page does read like it's passing it off as original thought (whatever that means), but had a quick look at the linked PDF. It doesn't make any attempt to hide the historical and academic context of the Great Man Theory from the reader. Whole thing might be bullshit, but your comment comes across as overly sneering. Whether it's worth sharing with anyone is a judgement left to the reader. I didn't read the whole thing, but had a glance at the last chapter in China and learned a few things to look into that I didn't know about before in regards to history there. If the author self-censored to please you, that wouldn't have happened. Your outrage over someone writing down some thoughts in a structured way and sharing it seems like a waste.
  - __loam 3y ago
    Overly sneering. Holy shit. People who write 200 page books with chapters named "How Elon Musk made engineering cool again" deserve ridicule.
    - ac2u 3y ago
      >Overly sneering. Of course it is... if the author said to you in real life, at a party, "I've been working on a book called X and it roughly follows this thesis", a regular person wouldn't immediately take your tone, it's an entirely online persona, and if it's not, then it's not well socially adjusted. Ridicule has it's place, but you're acting like the author is pretending that the Great Man Theory doesn't exist and is trying to hoodwink the reader. >with chapters named "How Elon Musk made engineering cool again" I mean the chapter was about the dual falcon landings and the tesla in space, both cool things that captured mainstream media attention. Not controversial to say so. Hyperbole if it depicted it as a lone wolf Elon Musk effort, but it's a Chapter title, not something to get exited over. >deserve ridicule. Hey if that's how you wanna direct your precious time, go for it. Seems author is a political scientist type figure. I usually take their musings with a heavy pinch of salt, but I don't really go as out of my way as you do to get hot and bothered and treat it like it's a crime against the zeitgeist that it's taking up a few KB of bandwidth.
dmn322 3y ago
https://spacechimplife.com/theories-of-historical-change/ https://spacechimplife.com/theories-of-historical-change/
DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
> My answer is that a small number of functional institutions founded by exceptional individuals form the core of society I stopped reading past this.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  I understand where you're coming from and that's only the third sentence of the preface. So you have to figure anybody could get that far in no time. What about that second sentence then? >What are the origins of institutional health or sclerosis? When it comes to sclerosis or more tragic decline I guess we'll have to chalk that up to not-so-great successors to truly great founders . . . in theory.
ldehaan 3y ago
[dead]
julianeon 3y ago
I have to respect the grift. It’s so perfectly calibrated to its audience: essentially the people who the X account “VCs congratulating themselves” makes fun of, and a much larger group of their fans or hangers on (really often the latter cosplaying as the former). For that audience this is the perfect treat. A document like this really positions him well within that ecosystem.
- voz_ 3y ago
  You wrote X and it took me a few moments to realize you meant Twitter. Just call it that, don’t humor the clown, and it’s easier to parse.
narrator 3y ago
[flagged]
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  I'm torn because I agree with your first principles, but not where they lead your thinking.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- woodruffw 3y ago
  Torturing the tabula rasa into a culture war argument is more than a little ironic, given that the people most frequently identified with the concept are generally pretty high up on lists of “great men.” (It becomes even more ironic when you realize that the tabula rasa was itself a borrowed concept in both Descartes’ and Locke’s writing.)
- seanhunter 3y ago
  That's a very nice straw man you've built there and I have to admire the way you've managed to wedge in some devisive culture war rhetoric as well. Whatever you think about San Francisco isn't anything to do with this topic. The opposite of Great Man Theory is that rather than single individuals making the difference, most important progress is made by teams. That's it. You can agree or disagree but people opposing GMT aren't saying anything like your pastiche here.
  - narrator 3y ago
    The problem here is you consider being a criminal, criminally insane or extremely high on drugs just "culture." You refuse to draw the line of social exclusion anywhere. There is no unacceptable behavior because it's all just "culture." Is rampant theft a culture war issue? Is people not being charged for repeated random assaults a culture war issue? Is people out of their minds on meth, and passing out for hours and even dying from overdoses in public bathrooms a culture war issue? This is why we must have the Target store with all merchandise locked in glass cases, and the Starbucks with no seating or bathrooms in order to accommodate San Francisco's unique "culture" of acceptance of those who are criminals, criminally insane or high on drugs. They would all be billionaires except for systemic bias, so we must accommodate them. The slippery slope isn't done yet. They've even started to let people off lightly on murder charges in Oakland, the ultimate strawman argument comes true[1]! So progressive! [1] https://www.berkeleyscanner.com/2023/02/09/courts/district-attorney-pamela-price-delonzo-logwood-plea-deal/ https://www.berkeleyscanner.com/2023/02/09/courts/district-a...
ITB 3y ago
So far all the comments are against great person theory. But what is the counterpoint? Companies like Apple and spaceX are just inevitable and some lucky bastards will just stumble upon them? That’s nonsense. There might be more than one candidate to become Steve Jobs but not that many. Would e-commerce have evolved without JeffB or smartphones be invented without Apple? Probably, but it might have taken longer, or they might have been invented in another country, greatly hurting America’s prospects. To this date Amazon has the best e-commerce logistics on the planet. Doing things ahead of its time, by gathering the right people and enough money, is a very unique skill. Couple that with being well positioned for a certain “inevitable” innovation and that limits the number of people even more. There’s also a compounding effect. Walking backwards from humanity’s global tech maxima, if every key innovation was late by a few years, the overall maxima might be late by hundreds of years, maybe worse. Maybe humanity ends due to an asteroid impact because we didn't get advanced enough to protect ourselves in time.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  The counterargument to “great man theory” is that it’s ahistorical (in that most great advancements have multiple independent discoverers), and unduly emphasizes individuals rather than circumstances. In other words: it’s hard to believe that there’s something intrinsic about Newton, Galileo, etc. that would have fundamentally prevented the arc of human history and knowledge had they not done what they did. The much more parsimonious explanation is that “great men” were in the right place at the right time to apply their (undisputed!) talents.
  - kubb 3y ago
    And that we are genetically predisposed towards worshipping individual human-like figures. Think for a second about Gilgamesh (one of the oldest known works of literature!), Prometheus (gave humans fire, where would we be without him), Hercules (killed a menacing beast, thank god for that), the Olympic gods, Gaius Julius Cesar, Napoleon, Lenin, modern celebrities (they're so talented and totally deserve their success). Is it surprising that we want to believe in "great men"?
  - gniv 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mellosouls 3y ago
Announcement page, actual document is linked at the end of the advert. (2020, pdf). Not sure why the author prefix is in the title here. https://samoburja.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Great_Founder_Theory_by_Samo_Burja_2020_Manuscript.pdf https://samoburja.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Great_Found... A non-pdf introduction to it here: https://medium.com/@samo.burja/great-founder-theory-93751e25c173 https://medium.com/@samo.burja/great-founder-theory-93751e25...
_xnmw 3y ago
In my view, Great Man Theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy with survival bias. Those who believe it are the most likely to take insane risks, and therefore most likely to end up at the head of some great movement, or die trying. All those great visionaries, those Napoleons, Jobs, Musks, Newtons and Galileos were also "natural maniacs" [1]. The ones who fail we simply call "insane" and history forgets them. Nevertheless success is from God (i.e. not the product of one's effort but outside of one's control, right place right time + luck). In other words, belief is a necessary but not sufficient condition. [1] On Natural Maniacs: https://collabfund.com/blog/natural-maniacs/ https://collabfund.com/blog/natural-maniacs/
- bibanez 3y ago
  I agree that this is the sensible way to look at it. I oppose cults of personality on people for the same reason: even the most genial individual is human, and often not very well-balanced. Don't place made up expectations and be dissappointed, remain critical and fair (as much as you can) in judging public figures!
- Kon5ole 3y ago
  The old Apple ad "think different" promotes the same perspective. People credited with notable changes throughout history are by definition "crazy" since sanity is defined by being the same as anyone else. Thinking that it's impossible to be great seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. As someone once said, "whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right".
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Jobs was a '60s hippie who showed up to work at HP barefoot and un-showered. If anything, he deserves the title of 'the crazy one'. His era is very different from the one that Musk, Neumann, Kalanick and others grew up in. These were rich, connected people that wouldn't get out of bed without a multi-million dollar term sheet.
throwaway5947 3y ago
Mumbles something about complexity theory and system dynamics.
simne 3y ago
Interest thing. Before Ukrainian war I have very critical view on Great_man_theory, but during war my opinion changed. What I really see, at calm time, great man is not important, because just free market work good enough. But at tough time, great man could save lot of lives, lot of resources. Same thing works at very large organizations - at lowest levels of hierarchy, general persons are good enough, but on top, need great man. So idea, that at some scale, need exceptional people.

61 points by haneefmubarak 3y ago

It's absolutely incredible to see someone take the Great Man Theory, something that has been greatly criticized in historical circles, and apply a tech bro bullshit veneer to it to pass it off as some new and amazing thought worth sharing with everyone. Here's my own Great Founder Theory: I don't think founders matter nearly as much as people in Silicon Valley think they do. They're basically there to give VCs a figure head they can point to and claim some new effort to financialize and monopolize another part of our economy is backed by some brilliant ass hole they found somewhere who started this thing in their garage. There have of course been very intelligent and hard working founders, but imo whether your startup succeeds has much more to do with product market fit and timing than it does with the quality of the founder. Just look at what a shitheel uber had at the beginning.

flimsypremise 3y ago
Hah, came here to post basically this. One of the clearest illustrations of what I call Silicon Valley Brain.
gniv 3y ago
> They're basically there to give VCs a figure head they can point to and claim some new effort to financialize and monopolize another part of our economy is backed by some brilliant ass hole they found somewhere who started this thing in their garage. There have of course been very intelligent and hard working founders, but imo whether your startup succeeds has much more to do with product market fit and timing than it does with the quality of the founder. This reads funny to me since unwittingly you seem to agree to the Great Founder Theory. Product market fit is hard to come by but is relatively easy to recognize. This is the role of VCs. You try to argue that founders are interchangeable but I don’t see it. If anything, VCs are more interchangeable.
ac2u 3y ago
>to pass it off as some new and amazing thought worth sharing with everyone The linked page does read like it's passing it off as original thought (whatever that means), but had a quick look at the linked PDF. It doesn't make any attempt to hide the historical and academic context of the Great Man Theory from the reader. Whole thing might be bullshit, but your comment comes across as overly sneering. Whether it's worth sharing with anyone is a judgement left to the reader. I didn't read the whole thing, but had a glance at the last chapter in China and learned a few things to look into that I didn't know about before in regards to history there. If the author self-censored to please you, that wouldn't have happened. Your outrage over someone writing down some thoughts in a structured way and sharing it seems like a waste.
- __loam 3y ago
  Overly sneering. Holy shit. People who write 200 page books with chapters named "How Elon Musk made engineering cool again" deserve ridicule.
  - ac2u 3y ago
    >Overly sneering. Of course it is... if the author said to you in real life, at a party, "I've been working on a book called X and it roughly follows this thesis", a regular person wouldn't immediately take your tone, it's an entirely online persona, and if it's not, then it's not well socially adjusted. Ridicule has it's place, but you're acting like the author is pretending that the Great Man Theory doesn't exist and is trying to hoodwink the reader. >with chapters named "How Elon Musk made engineering cool again" I mean the chapter was about the dual falcon landings and the tesla in space, both cool things that captured mainstream media attention. Not controversial to say so. Hyperbole if it depicted it as a lone wolf Elon Musk effort, but it's a Chapter title, not something to get exited over. >deserve ridicule. Hey if that's how you wanna direct your precious time, go for it. Seems author is a political scientist type figure. I usually take their musings with a heavy pinch of salt, but I don't really go as out of my way as you do to get hot and bothered and treat it like it's a crime against the zeitgeist that it's taking up a few KB of bandwidth.

dmn322 3y ago

https://spacechimplife.com/theories-of-historical-change/ https://spacechimplife.com/theories-of-historical-change/

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago

> My answer is that a small number of functional institutions founded by exceptional individuals form the core of society I stopped reading past this.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fuzzfactor 3y ago
I understand where you're coming from and that's only the third sentence of the preface. So you have to figure anybody could get that far in no time. What about that second sentence then? >What are the origins of institutional health or sclerosis? When it comes to sclerosis or more tragic decline I guess we'll have to chalk that up to not-so-great successors to truly great founders . . . in theory.

ldehaan 3y ago

[dead]

julianeon 3y ago

I have to respect the grift. It’s so perfectly calibrated to its audience: essentially the people who the X account “VCs congratulating themselves” makes fun of, and a much larger group of their fans or hangers on (really often the latter cosplaying as the former). For that audience this is the perfect treat. A document like this really positions him well within that ecosystem.

voz_ 3y ago
You wrote X and it took me a few moments to realize you meant Twitter. Just call it that, don’t humor the clown, and it’s easier to parse.

narrator 3y ago

[flagged]

EdwardDiego 3y ago
I'm torn because I agree with your first principles, but not where they lead your thinking.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
woodruffw 3y ago
Torturing the tabula rasa into a culture war argument is more than a little ironic, given that the people most frequently identified with the concept are generally pretty high up on lists of “great men.” (It becomes even more ironic when you realize that the tabula rasa was itself a borrowed concept in both Descartes’ and Locke’s writing.)
seanhunter 3y ago
That's a very nice straw man you've built there and I have to admire the way you've managed to wedge in some devisive culture war rhetoric as well. Whatever you think about San Francisco isn't anything to do with this topic. The opposite of Great Man Theory is that rather than single individuals making the difference, most important progress is made by teams. That's it. You can agree or disagree but people opposing GMT aren't saying anything like your pastiche here.
- narrator 3y ago
  The problem here is you consider being a criminal, criminally insane or extremely high on drugs just "culture." You refuse to draw the line of social exclusion anywhere. There is no unacceptable behavior because it's all just "culture." Is rampant theft a culture war issue? Is people not being charged for repeated random assaults a culture war issue? Is people out of their minds on meth, and passing out for hours and even dying from overdoses in public bathrooms a culture war issue? This is why we must have the Target store with all merchandise locked in glass cases, and the Starbucks with no seating or bathrooms in order to accommodate San Francisco's unique "culture" of acceptance of those who are criminals, criminally insane or high on drugs. They would all be billionaires except for systemic bias, so we must accommodate them. The slippery slope isn't done yet. They've even started to let people off lightly on murder charges in Oakland, the ultimate strawman argument comes true[1]! So progressive! [1] https://www.berkeleyscanner.com/2023/02/09/courts/district-attorney-pamela-price-delonzo-logwood-plea-deal/ https://www.berkeleyscanner.com/2023/02/09/courts/district-a...

ITB 3y ago

So far all the comments are against great person theory. But what is the counterpoint? Companies like Apple and spaceX are just inevitable and some lucky bastards will just stumble upon them? That’s nonsense. There might be more than one candidate to become Steve Jobs but not that many. Would e-commerce have evolved without JeffB or smartphones be invented without Apple? Probably, but it might have taken longer, or they might have been invented in another country, greatly hurting America’s prospects. To this date Amazon has the best e-commerce logistics on the planet. Doing things ahead of its time, by gathering the right people and enough money, is a very unique skill. Couple that with being well positioned for a certain “inevitable” innovation and that limits the number of people even more. There’s also a compounding effect. Walking backwards from humanity’s global tech maxima, if every key innovation was late by a few years, the overall maxima might be late by hundreds of years, maybe worse. Maybe humanity ends due to an asteroid impact because we didn't get advanced enough to protect ourselves in time.

woodruffw 3y ago
The counterargument to “great man theory” is that it’s ahistorical (in that most great advancements have multiple independent discoverers), and unduly emphasizes individuals rather than circumstances. In other words: it’s hard to believe that there’s something intrinsic about Newton, Galileo, etc. that would have fundamentally prevented the arc of human history and knowledge had they not done what they did. The much more parsimonious explanation is that “great men” were in the right place at the right time to apply their (undisputed!) talents.
- kubb 3y ago
  And that we are genetically predisposed towards worshipping individual human-like figures. Think for a second about Gilgamesh (one of the oldest known works of literature!), Prometheus (gave humans fire, where would we be without him), Hercules (killed a menacing beast, thank god for that), the Olympic gods, Gaius Julius Cesar, Napoleon, Lenin, modern celebrities (they're so talented and totally deserve their success). Is it surprising that we want to believe in "great men"?
- gniv 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mellosouls 3y ago

Announcement page, actual document is linked at the end of the advert. (2020, pdf). Not sure why the author prefix is in the title here. https://samoburja.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Great_Founder_Theory_by_Samo_Burja_2020_Manuscript.pdf https://samoburja.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Great_Found... A non-pdf introduction to it here: https://medium.com/@samo.burja/great-founder-theory-93751e25c173 https://medium.com/@samo.burja/great-founder-theory-93751e25...

_xnmw 3y ago

In my view, Great Man Theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy with survival bias. Those who believe it are the most likely to take insane risks, and therefore most likely to end up at the head of some great movement, or die trying. All those great visionaries, those Napoleons, Jobs, Musks, Newtons and Galileos were also "natural maniacs" [1]. The ones who fail we simply call "insane" and history forgets them. Nevertheless success is from God (i.e. not the product of one's effort but outside of one's control, right place right time + luck). In other words, belief is a necessary but not sufficient condition. [1] On Natural Maniacs: https://collabfund.com/blog/natural-maniacs/ https://collabfund.com/blog/natural-maniacs/

bibanez 3y ago
I agree that this is the sensible way to look at it. I oppose cults of personality on people for the same reason: even the most genial individual is human, and often not very well-balanced. Don't place made up expectations and be dissappointed, remain critical and fair (as much as you can) in judging public figures!
Kon5ole 3y ago
The old Apple ad "think different" promotes the same perspective. People credited with notable changes throughout history are by definition "crazy" since sanity is defined by being the same as anyone else. Thinking that it's impossible to be great seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. As someone once said, "whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right".
- rchaud 3y ago
  Jobs was a '60s hippie who showed up to work at HP barefoot and un-showered. If anything, he deserves the title of 'the crazy one'. His era is very different from the one that Musk, Neumann, Kalanick and others grew up in. These were rich, connected people that wouldn't get out of bed without a multi-million dollar term sheet.

throwaway5947 3y ago

Mumbles something about complexity theory and system dynamics.

simne 3y ago

Interest thing. Before Ukrainian war I have very critical view on Great_man_theory, but during war my opinion changed. What I really see, at calm time, great man is not important, because just free market work good enough. But at tough time, great man could save lot of lives, lot of resources. Same thing works at very large organizations - at lowest levels of hierarchy, general persons are good enough, but on top, need great man. So idea, that at some scale, need exceptional people.