Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed. Including Arabic, a11y, spam filtering, and all the other messy stuff.
You know the problem with that statement? No one will give me 10 motivated people, 5 years, and room to focus.
First, any ten people you find will care about having fun, making money, preparing for their next career step. Beyond a pizza box team, finding people motivated by a common good is impossible.
Second, if you give me room to focus, you won't know that I'm not playing video games all day. You don't want that. You'll want to monitor what I'm doing. My ability to keep collecting my paycheck will be based on keeping you happy (perhaps with false reports of progress, if you don't set things up right).
And so on.
Once you factor in the human constraints, I have no idea how to beat Google. If I did, I'd have a second unicorn on my belt.
I'll mention: I've had that magical scenario -- money and room to focus -- exactly once in my career. I did built a unicorn in a few months. Once those dynamics kicked in, there was near-zero further progress, but the organization eventually sold for around $1B (and that was after losing a lot of further value). That was based on me having a few months with a 100% carve-out to focus completely, as well as to spend money as I saw fit.
As organizations get bigger, these problems get harder. Right now, in a typical day, in my current job, I can code for at most 3 hours. Just as often, this is zero hours. I couldn't build the same unicorn with that level of split focus in any amount of time. I'm amazed at the difference in how much I get done.
The technical problems to beating Google aren't impossible to solve, but the hard problems aren't technical.
Been there, done that. It turns out throwing money at problems doesn't generally solve them. People will be motivated to keep getting paid obscene salaries. Keep their boss happy isn't the same as being aligned and focused on a common vision.
Indeed, in most cases, when people are aligned around a common vision, you don't need to pay them very much. People seem to do best when they're paid enough in order to not have financial stress so they can focus on work (with the caveat that the pay ought to be stable), but where the financial motivation doesn't replace intrinsic motivation. That's a rare scenario you only see in a few settings (e.g. sixties-era academia).
If throwing money at people worked to keep them aligned, FAANG would have hyper-aligned work forces. You can look at any of them.
Saying that Google has "thrown the best talent money can buy at the problem for 2 decades" visualizes this very nicely. Throwing people at problems and having people solve problems working together productively are two very different things. If I (or anyone else) could solve the latter problem -- making large numbers of people work together, aligned, and productively, I'd be richer than any tech mogul.
Throwing people at problems results in a lot of very fun play, though!
> Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed. Including Arabic, a11y, spam filtering, and all the other messy stuff.
This is 60 million USD paying those 10 handsomely to keep them happy.
Having built your unicorn that sold for a billion+ you’d think funding would be straight forward for you. You don’t know a single VC? Self-funding isn’t an option?
2) Self-funding is hard for me, because I didn't take into account human, political, and organizational issues. I proposed and built an awesome technology, but that doesn't mean I was compensated for it.
A few fallacies:
- Keeping people happy isn't the same as keeping people aligned and productive.
- Keeping funders happy means I can't give technical work 100% focus.
- Keeping funders happy also constrains technical work; for example, showing progress is often in friction with not taking on technical debt.
If only you could be left alone to unleash your brilliance with your friends, you could make a trillion dollar company. Unfortunately it looks like no one believes you / believes in you enough to help you with this.
While your comment is sarcastic, it is correct. It's also not specific to me -- there are trainloads of people who could build trillion-dollar companies if magically freed from human issues, such as trust.
When I was young, I thought technical problems were hard, and made comments just like yours when more experienced people told me technical problems were easy and human problems were hard. I ignored them too.
Unfortunately, there isn't any magic. We all compete on equal ground, having to solve both technical and human issues.
I think you're misunderstanding my point here so I'll be clear:
I think you and those truckloads of people you're referencing may be overestimating your technical prowess. If you were truly capable of the feats you claimed, someone would find an operator and CEO to handle all the messy parts for you and wait for their 10000x returns in 5 years.
> It's also not specific to me -- there are trainloads of people who could build trillion-dollar companies if magically freed from human issues, such as trust.
... ah yes, if only they trust everyone who claimed this and gave them the money. Truckloads of trillion dollar companies.
Edit:
> When I was young, I thought technical problems were hard, and made comments just like yours when more experienced people told me technical problems were easy and human problems were hard. I ignored them too.
There are hard technical problems. Autonomous self-driving cars, for example. Waymo would love to hire you to deliver this in 5 years with a handful of friends.
VR headsets that are lightweight, wireless, and can drive high fidelity experiences is another example. Meta would love to get in touch.
Drones that can safely deliver packages at scale while following US regulations is interesting. Amazon would love to hire you or buy your startup.
I don't discount how hard operating is. I know though the long leash you have if you're truly exceptional.
I understand your point. As I said, I would have made the same point when I was half my age. I understand it all too well. Younger me would not have believed older me either.
I'm not overestimating my own prowess. I've done it before, moved into management, executive, and now back into primarily technical / tech leadership. I've had multiple perspectives on this. I've also had plenty of technically exceptional employees who could, in abstract, do the technical part of this as well.
What you're clear underestimating is the organizational and human part of this. You can't just hire a CEO, and hope they'll magically solve it for you, anymore than you can't just hire a random engineering grad and hope they'll build you a self-driving car. And as I said, simply handing someone money, no matter how good they are and how much money you hand them will rarely result in any important technical problems solved without the right organizational structures.
And while there are some technically hard problems, like self-driving cars, that's not the majority of unicorns. I've also worked at a company that solved a problem of similar complexity as several of the ones you listed (with about 20 employees, and about a decade of funding). That one had *both* hard technical and human problems. Without solving the human problems, it wouldn't have had the right 20 employees, nor the decade of sustained funding. And those employees would not have solved the right set of hard problems to make an economically-viable entity.
You're completely missing where the hard parts of making a successful organization lie, or why they're hard.
I think you're saying "if somebody gives me <something that is essentially non-existent>, I can do something really cool."
There's a lot of wriggle room with the goalposts here, as they say it's basically impossible to falsify your statement, since you can shift the burden on the proclaimed "hard" bits (i.e. "human problems"). I'll just re-iterate the point made by others that what people normally mean by "10 motivated, aligned high-quality people" is probably not what you purported to mean. Normally "10 motivated, aligned high-quality people" exists. You claim it doesn't even exist in practice.
The rest of the discussion is just people talking past each other.
Yep seen the same thing. In terms of 10 people I'd go further give me 1-2 fantastic "unicorn" devs and enough time, I could build you just about anything.
It just so happens no one in any org gets that time and keeping those unicorn devs focused is very hard. Very small annoyances can cause them to leave and that's what they do.
I have seen people single handily build amazing stuff but it never lasts. Eventually someone gets left with the half built system and then a team needs to take over and bloat and ...
>Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed.
Is this unique to you, or can others do the same with the same 10 people?
If not unique to you, how come 7 billion people on the planet have not been able to do this over the past 25 years? Certainly this many people of that caliber get together often enough to do this, right?
If unique to you, then you really need to just find one person in that 7 billion to fund you so we can see another trillion dollar company get built in 5 years by 10 people.
Or, third option, this isn't reality, and you're missing some understanding of the issues involved.
No, that's the point. The people do exist, and aren't even uncommon. What doesn't exist -- at least replicably -- are the organizational structures around those people.
Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed. Including Arabic, a11y, spam filtering, and all the other messy stuff.
You know the problem with that statement? No one will give me 10 motivated people, 5 years, and room to focus.
First, any ten people you find will care about having fun, making money, preparing for their next career step. Beyond a pizza box team, finding people motivated by a common good is impossible.
Second, if you give me room to focus, you won't know that I'm not playing video games all day. You don't want that. You'll want to monitor what I'm doing. My ability to keep collecting my paycheck will be based on keeping you happy (perhaps with false reports of progress, if you don't set things up right).
And so on.
Once you factor in the human constraints, I have no idea how to beat Google. If I did, I'd have a second unicorn on my belt.
I'll mention: I've had that magical scenario -- money and room to focus -- exactly once in my career. I did built a unicorn in a few months. Once those dynamics kicked in, there was near-zero further progress, but the organization eventually sold for around $1B (and that was after losing a lot of further value). That was based on me having a few months with a 100% carve-out to focus completely, as well as to spend money as I saw fit.
As organizations get bigger, these problems get harder. Right now, in a typical day, in my current job, I can code for at most 3 hours. Just as often, this is zero hours. I couldn't build the same unicorn with that level of split focus in any amount of time. I'm amazed at the difference in how much I get done.
The technical problems to beating Google aren't impossible to solve, but the hard problems aren't technical.