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> McKinsey & Co.-trained entrepreneur who abandoned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics to build startups in sub-Saharan Africa That does not sound like the profile

> McKinsey & Co.-trained entrepreneur who abandoned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics to build startups in sub-Saharan Africa That does not sound like the profile I'd want to run a moonshot project. To me you either you want someone who is very goal oriented to do a research lab approach or very product oriented to do a deep tech startup approach. Abandoning a PhD indicate it's not the former and McKinsey indicates it's not the latter.

Waterluvian 2y ago
That whole first paragraph elicited a nearly irreversible eyeroll.
- mateus1 2y ago
  Have we learned nothing of mythologizing these tech people? That sentence, structured to make this executive seem super human, is a lot of what is wrong about SV. Putting consulting/finance showmen (and women) above true innovators.
  - aikinai 2y ago
    She’s was a PhD candidate in theoretical physics and is working at a startup directly building mobility robotics prototypes. How is she a consulting/finance showman? Because she was at McKinsey at one point? Maybe if she quit immediately after losing the Google X prestige you might be able to infer something about her motivations, but she’s clearly passionate about the deep engineering project she’s working on and still at it even in the startup environment, so your comment seems to completely miss the mark.
    - bumby 2y ago
      To me, it raises red flags of status-seeking behavior (ie, extrinsic motivation). I read the OP as saying the person was looking to check resume boxes rather than achieve something great. There's almost a template of what the stereotypical SV entrepreneur's resume "should" look like, and it's part of that myth. Sometimes, I think people get too concerned with looking the part rather than being the part. (I can't speak specifically in this situation because it's behind a paywall). It's not that people can't achieve great things by extrinsic motivation, but if I were a betting person (and that's essentially what VC is), I'd prefer to put my money on someone with more intrinsic motivation because it tends to wane less when things get tough or the tides of what's trendy change.
      - RandomLensman 2y ago
        I think this is mixing somewhat the portrait of that person with who that person might. The portrait might be somewhat stereotypical but the person might not be.
        bumby 2y ago
        Of course that’s possible, but unless we know them personally, there only information we have is from their portrait. That’s also why I said they are “red flags” and not definitive conclusions.
    - coliveira 2y ago
      > she’s clearly passionate about the deep engineering project There is nothing there saying that she is passionate about anything. The kind of thing she's doing is only a job. Just because you're doing something related to startups doesn't mean you love startups, most of the time it is just a job you need to do to get from point A to point B.
  - abakker 2y ago
    Meh, this assumes that there are no other ways for innovators to build businesses than running google x. In fact, most innovations do not come from here. OTOH, a lot of innovators fail to make businesses, so, I think you can't draw much conclusion from a single sentence in an article. As to what is wrong with SV - it's really what's wrong with the market in general. After years of no interest rates and dumb ideas like Juicero, reality is setting in as the cost of capital is not zero, and so equity holders have plenty of alternative returns that are acceptable and don't require moonshots.
  - varelse 2y ago
    [dead]
- marcinzm 2y ago
  The mountain climbing is also amusing since, in my experience, running moonshots needs someone who is inherently lazy. Driven, yes, but also lazy. You don't want someone who climbs mountains as a hobby. You want someone who figures out how to get a helicopter to take them to the top of the mountain. You need to de-risk every single thing possible, even if others say you can't do that, by taking the laziest and least risky approach. Then concentrate on the areas you can't de-risk. Then once you get it running you iterate and optimize the lazy bits. edit: Actually de-risk and not simply lie about de-risking. Eventually you need to publicly test the prototype and the lies will fall apart.
  - davidrm 2y ago
    (I'm going to assume you're serious). Only in the tech bubble could a hobby which is challenging and probably gruesome at certain points, be held against you. In any normal conversation a person who climbs literal mountains would be looked at in a positive light. Not saying it's the one defining quality you'd need to successfully run a company, but you somehow managed to place it at the completely wrong side of the proverbial scale. Of course, it's probably completely insignificant and uncorrelated, but I wouldn't be surprised to read that someone who plays a piano is also incompetent to run a company because ...I don't know, I guess I'll have to wait to read that one here soon.
    - marcinzm 2y ago
      Something can be good for X overall but be bad for subsets of X. The fact that you find it so offensive for me to even make that statement says more about the mono culture you view the world through than the one I view the world through. edit: Of course Google, the king of the tech bubble, saw this as a positive so your statement about this being a tech bubble thing is also really amusing. If anything the tech bubble would likely agree with you so you're part of the tech bubble mindset on this one.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      I think it depends what exactly you're doing. Me, I think "moonshot" is a very buzzy buzzword, not a concrete thing, despite what it's named after. I've listened to both Chris Hadfield's "An Astronauts Guide to Life on Earth" and Richard Wiseman's "Shoot for the Moon", and it was extremely clear how little there was in common between the perspective of the professional psychologist and the guy who actually went into space.
is_true 2y ago
McKinsey trains you to squeeze every cent possible from corporations
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  While training your competitors or political rivals as well.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Not just corporations. Plenty in government as well.
  - is_true 2y ago
    Actually, they train you to squeeze money from everyone. They squeeze money from you to help you squeeze money out of your customers.
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
> McKinsey & Co.-trained entrepreneur who abandoned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics to build startups in sub-Saharan Africa wasn't Jerry Maguire engaged to be married to this combination of bullet-points at one point - also the mountain climbing...
ivan_gammel 2y ago
> Abandoning a PhD indicate it's not the former How is that? PhD is just a title indicating some relationship to science. If you have successful career as a goal, you started PhD thinking it will be useful, the got better understanding of your needs and switched to something else, that is called being able to make a tough call. If anything, experience of pivots is a startup person quality.
- StableAlkyne 2y ago
  A PhD only proves you can stick through on a research project for 4-5 years and can convince 3-4 other PhDs that you are a competent scientist So it doesn't necessarily correlate with research aptitude. I've known incompetent PhDs and incredibly talented folks who only had a BS ...but for a company as distracted by shiny things as Google, where a major trust problem is that they get bored and drop products after a couple years, maybe they should look at "ability to stick things through" as an important qualification
  - dgellow 2y ago
    Pretty sure the lack of focus from the top. From what I understand people working there are as confused as the general public when something gets dropped or the 10th messenger service is announced
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    But Google doesn't drop projects because some researchers or devs got bored. That's a management decision.
- marcinzm 2y ago
  Moonshot to me indicates there is a specific goal versus simply making a startup that may pivot utterly. If the Apollo project ended up building a high speed train then it'd have been a failure no matter how good that train was.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
robertlagrant 2y ago
> Founding team of the African office of investment fund focused on starting new businesses from scratch to fix market failures. This is context from the person's LinkedIn[0] - looks like maybe someone who was a manager in a fund that had preallocated money to be spent on African agri-businesses, rather than you might think of when you read the phrase "building startups". [0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-zealand/details/experience https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-zealand/details/experien...
dgellow 2y ago
You would need way more information to judge, you cannot dismiss someone just based on that type of details, it’s too low quality data points to be interpreted as meaningful signal Edit: anecdotally, I know the company has pretty bad reputation however ex-McKinsey coworkers I’m working with are exactly what you described, “very product oriented to do a deep tech startup approach”. Also pretty good engineers.
AlwaysRock 2y ago
McKinsey & Co. has 45k employees. The stereotype you might have of their employees is not universal. I know someone who worked for a startup/greenfield tech project division at a similar company who went to that job from a start up and right back into a start up after it. Looks like they McKinsey has a whole arm, Fuel, doing that type of work: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/how-we-help-clients/startups-venture-capital https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...
sandspar 2y ago
The ultimate blob-person: a highly intelligent, fanatically hard working person who's motivated by establishment prestige above all else.

Waterluvian 2y ago

That whole first paragraph elicited a nearly irreversible eyeroll.

mateus1 2y ago
Have we learned nothing of mythologizing these tech people? That sentence, structured to make this executive seem super human, is a lot of what is wrong about SV. Putting consulting/finance showmen (and women) above true innovators.
- aikinai 2y ago
  She’s was a PhD candidate in theoretical physics and is working at a startup directly building mobility robotics prototypes. How is she a consulting/finance showman? Because she was at McKinsey at one point? Maybe if she quit immediately after losing the Google X prestige you might be able to infer something about her motivations, but she’s clearly passionate about the deep engineering project she’s working on and still at it even in the startup environment, so your comment seems to completely miss the mark.
  - bumby 2y ago
    To me, it raises red flags of status-seeking behavior (ie, extrinsic motivation). I read the OP as saying the person was looking to check resume boxes rather than achieve something great. There's almost a template of what the stereotypical SV entrepreneur's resume "should" look like, and it's part of that myth. Sometimes, I think people get too concerned with looking the part rather than being the part. (I can't speak specifically in this situation because it's behind a paywall). It's not that people can't achieve great things by extrinsic motivation, but if I were a betting person (and that's essentially what VC is), I'd prefer to put my money on someone with more intrinsic motivation because it tends to wane less when things get tough or the tides of what's trendy change.
    - RandomLensman 2y ago
      I think this is mixing somewhat the portrait of that person with who that person might. The portrait might be somewhat stereotypical but the person might not be.
      - bumby 2y ago
        Of course that’s possible, but unless we know them personally, there only information we have is from their portrait. That’s also why I said they are “red flags” and not definitive conclusions.
  - coliveira 2y ago
    > she’s clearly passionate about the deep engineering project There is nothing there saying that she is passionate about anything. The kind of thing she's doing is only a job. Just because you're doing something related to startups doesn't mean you love startups, most of the time it is just a job you need to do to get from point A to point B.
- abakker 2y ago
  Meh, this assumes that there are no other ways for innovators to build businesses than running google x. In fact, most innovations do not come from here. OTOH, a lot of innovators fail to make businesses, so, I think you can't draw much conclusion from a single sentence in an article. As to what is wrong with SV - it's really what's wrong with the market in general. After years of no interest rates and dumb ideas like Juicero, reality is setting in as the cost of capital is not zero, and so equity holders have plenty of alternative returns that are acceptable and don't require moonshots.
- varelse 2y ago
  [dead]
marcinzm 2y ago
The mountain climbing is also amusing since, in my experience, running moonshots needs someone who is inherently lazy. Driven, yes, but also lazy. You don't want someone who climbs mountains as a hobby. You want someone who figures out how to get a helicopter to take them to the top of the mountain. You need to de-risk every single thing possible, even if others say you can't do that, by taking the laziest and least risky approach. Then concentrate on the areas you can't de-risk. Then once you get it running you iterate and optimize the lazy bits. edit: Actually de-risk and not simply lie about de-risking. Eventually you need to publicly test the prototype and the lies will fall apart.
- davidrm 2y ago
  (I'm going to assume you're serious). Only in the tech bubble could a hobby which is challenging and probably gruesome at certain points, be held against you. In any normal conversation a person who climbs literal mountains would be looked at in a positive light. Not saying it's the one defining quality you'd need to successfully run a company, but you somehow managed to place it at the completely wrong side of the proverbial scale. Of course, it's probably completely insignificant and uncorrelated, but I wouldn't be surprised to read that someone who plays a piano is also incompetent to run a company because ...I don't know, I guess I'll have to wait to read that one here soon.
  - marcinzm 2y ago
    Something can be good for X overall but be bad for subsets of X. The fact that you find it so offensive for me to even make that statement says more about the mono culture you view the world through than the one I view the world through. edit: Of course Google, the king of the tech bubble, saw this as a positive so your statement about this being a tech bubble thing is also really amusing. If anything the tech bubble would likely agree with you so you're part of the tech bubble mindset on this one.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    I think it depends what exactly you're doing. Me, I think "moonshot" is a very buzzy buzzword, not a concrete thing, despite what it's named after. I've listened to both Chris Hadfield's "An Astronauts Guide to Life on Earth" and Richard Wiseman's "Shoot for the Moon", and it was extremely clear how little there was in common between the perspective of the professional psychologist and the guy who actually went into space.

is_true 2y ago

McKinsey trains you to squeeze every cent possible from corporations

raxxorraxor 2y ago
While training your competitors or political rivals as well.
robertlagrant 2y ago
Not just corporations. Plenty in government as well.
- is_true 2y ago
  Actually, they train you to squeeze money from everyone. They squeeze money from you to help you squeeze money out of your customers.

bryanrasmussen 2y ago

> McKinsey & Co.-trained entrepreneur who abandoned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics to build startups in sub-Saharan Africa wasn't Jerry Maguire engaged to be married to this combination of bullet-points at one point - also the mountain climbing...

ivan_gammel 2y ago

> Abandoning a PhD indicate it's not the former How is that? PhD is just a title indicating some relationship to science. If you have successful career as a goal, you started PhD thinking it will be useful, the got better understanding of your needs and switched to something else, that is called being able to make a tough call. If anything, experience of pivots is a startup person quality.

StableAlkyne 2y ago
A PhD only proves you can stick through on a research project for 4-5 years and can convince 3-4 other PhDs that you are a competent scientist So it doesn't necessarily correlate with research aptitude. I've known incompetent PhDs and incredibly talented folks who only had a BS ...but for a company as distracted by shiny things as Google, where a major trust problem is that they get bored and drop products after a couple years, maybe they should look at "ability to stick things through" as an important qualification
- dgellow 2y ago
  Pretty sure the lack of focus from the top. From what I understand people working there are as confused as the general public when something gets dropped or the 10th messenger service is announced
- JohnFen 2y ago
  But Google doesn't drop projects because some researchers or devs got bored. That's a management decision.
marcinzm 2y ago
Moonshot to me indicates there is a specific goal versus simply making a startup that may pivot utterly. If the Apollo project ended up building a high speed train then it'd have been a failure no matter how good that train was.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

robertlagrant 2y ago

> Founding team of the African office of investment fund focused on starting new businesses from scratch to fix market failures. This is context from the person's LinkedIn[0] - looks like maybe someone who was a manager in a fund that had preallocated money to be spent on African agri-businesses, rather than you might think of when you read the phrase "building startups". [0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-zealand/details/experience https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-zealand/details/experien...

dgellow 2y ago

You would need way more information to judge, you cannot dismiss someone just based on that type of details, it’s too low quality data points to be interpreted as meaningful signal Edit: anecdotally, I know the company has pretty bad reputation however ex-McKinsey coworkers I’m working with are exactly what you described, “very product oriented to do a deep tech startup approach”. Also pretty good engineers.

AlwaysRock 2y ago

McKinsey & Co. has 45k employees. The stereotype you might have of their employees is not universal. I know someone who worked for a startup/greenfield tech project division at a similar company who went to that job from a start up and right back into a start up after it. Looks like they McKinsey has a whole arm, Fuel, doing that type of work: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/how-we-help-clients/startups-venture-capital https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...

sandspar 2y ago

The ultimate blob-person: a highly intelligent, fanatically hard working person who's motivated by establishment prestige above all else.