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If you are the Richard Feynman of your field, don't you think you could pick up if someone is a good physicist or not in 10 minutes of talking about physics? No
by oskarth 13y ago
If you are the Richard Feynman of your field, don't you think you could pick up if someone is a good physicist or not in 10 minutes of talking about physics? Not just physics per say, but the mental models you have, the experiments you are going to perform, what kind of theories you have, what you've worked on before, etc. I certainly do, especially if you get to ask the questions.
- GuiA 13y agoThere are Richard Feynmans in math, biology, physics, computer science, etc. I'm not sure there are Richard Feynmans in startups or similarly "soft" fields.
- oskarth 13y agoThat's true. What about people like da Vinci or Michelangelo? I am not comparing pg to either of these three people, at least not directly. I'm just claiming that it's not unlikely there's some kind of taste, knowledge or whatever have you which he (and the other partners) possesses to a much higher degree than Random Joe Investor.
- nl 13y agoI'm not sure there are Richard Feynmans in startups or similarly "soft" fields. There are. Game recognize Game[1] is a thing for a reason. [1] If you need this footnote then it doesn't apply to you.
- yogo 13y agoI can sort of see this for physics but what if it's programming or software in general. I wouldn't be able to tell if someone is good if they were describing something to me in F#, as an example. They could be going about it the wrong way. What if someone was really onto something and they were describing it to you. They might be trying to explain it as simply as they possibly can and you might think you understand, but a lot could be lost and your impression might be that, that person is not good at what they are doing or that it's a toy. It all comes down to good communication but I think overall, we learn more over more time. I get that there is a time constraint with the current approach so maybe to scale things there should be some sort of engine that processes people/teams from a watch list over a period of time. For example, mine data from a private YC journal that applicants can start writing in a year or six months in advance. I don't think that should be a problem since a lot is submitted in the applications (my basic understanding of the process).