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"Hire everyone you know at Stanford." NEAT TRICK. Also "ignore diversity of thought," and apparently diversity of almost everything else. Absolutely stupid.
by cascas 13y ago
"Hire everyone you know at Stanford." NEAT TRICK. Also "ignore diversity of thought," and apparently diversity of almost everything else. Absolutely stupid.
- spamizbad 13y agoDiversity in this context seems to be programming language specialty which is completely reasonable when getting something off the ground. The whole school thing strikes me as weird though. Maybe if you're dealing with really green engineers stuff like that matters.
- MaxGabriel 13y agoI think it's more than that. Open this lecture from Peter Thiel and ctrl+f "hoops" http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-...
- matwood 13y agoThat's funny since I have a league 'hoops' game tonight. Exercise and other focus helps amazingly with my work. Weight lifting is another place where I come up with all sorts of solutions to work problems. The whole paragraph from the lecture just struck me as a nerds revenge/jealously since here was a guy who was as smart as them and a jock. What could they possible lean on then to think themselves superior!?
- spamizbad 13y agoWow. That's so terrible I had to double-check to make sure it wasn't satire.
- roc 13y ago> "The whole school thing strikes me as weird though." Weren't Levchin and Thiel both just out of school themselves? Who else would they really know?
- newnewnew 13y agoIs there any value in diversity for its own sake? If I'm trying to build a rocket to go to Mars, give me the best people, not the people that would look best in a university recruiting photograph.
- KurtMueller 13y agoGive me capable people from a wide array of backgrounds and watch them attack problems from their own unique angle.
- andrewflnr 13y agoA team is more than the sum of the players. An important part of doing good work on hard problems is avoiding thinking in circles. Diversity of thought, if not necessarily skin, is good for that.
- rhizome 13y agoLess diversity of thought increases the chances that everybody shares the same blind spots. It's a simple monoculture argument.
- jfoutz 13y agoDiversity value is inversely proportional to how well you understand the problem at hand. If you're building a rocket to mars, you probably need fewer psychologists than mechanical engineers. If you're an advertising agency, the situation is likely reversed.
- auctiontheory 13y agoIf you're building a rocket to Mars, you'd better have at least a few psychology types to anticipate (and prevent) miscommunications that result in a units-conversion error that blows up the shiny engineering thingie.
- crazygringo 13y agoThere is. But racial diversity has nothing to do with it. The more diverse the backgrounds and thought patterns are of people on a team, the more likely they'll think of and consider solutions and paths that might not have been considered otherwise -- or see pitfalls in them. If you're building a rocket to go to Mars, you absolutely want as much diversity in your engineering backgrounds as possible (assuming everyone already meets the engineering requirements in the first place).
- rhizome 13y ago"The object of business is to keep your buddies working, even if they're fuckin' idiots." --Roseanne Barr
- omonra 13y agoRight, because no startups have come out of Stanford and every successful was so because of their commitment to 'diversity' from the start.