It was interesting reading this, because those 5 points basically describe Google to a T. It's an aborted Ph.D thesis that took VC, hired lots of Ph.Ds with a culture "like a family", and then embarked on a hypergrowth trajectory.
The irony is that when Google was young, there was a different set of "destructive trends". They still included taking VC, but it was also common knowledge that:
1. You had to sell a physical product for money.
2. You had to build out all your infrastructure before you could bring a product to market.
3. Sales & marketing were more important than engineering.
4. (When they were hiring on their hypergrowth trajectory, 2001-2004:) The web is dead, and programming is a terrible career because it's all about to be outsourced to India.
Perhaps the meta-lesson is to do what other people are not doing. The point of markets is that they reward unexpected successes, where an entrepreneur serves a population with little competition, and that necessarily means thinking for yourself and ignoring the common wisdom. Fast.ai does an admirable job at that - their deep learning course is excellent - but taking their advice at face value is just as dumb as cargo-culting Google.
The irony is that when Google was young, there was a different set of "destructive trends". They still included taking VC, but it was also common knowledge that:
1. You had to sell a physical product for money.
2. You had to build out all your infrastructure before you could bring a product to market.
3. Sales & marketing were more important than engineering.
4. (When they were hiring on their hypergrowth trajectory, 2001-2004:) The web is dead, and programming is a terrible career because it's all about to be outsourced to India.
Perhaps the meta-lesson is to do what other people are not doing. The point of markets is that they reward unexpected successes, where an entrepreneur serves a population with little competition, and that necessarily means thinking for yourself and ignoring the common wisdom. Fast.ai does an admirable job at that - their deep learning course is excellent - but taking their advice at face value is just as dumb as cargo-culting Google.