spyhi

To be fair, it’s the horsepower of a mouse, but all devoted to a single task, so not 100% comparable to the capabilities of a mouse, and language is too distributed to make a good comparison of what milestone is human-like. But it’s indeed surprising how much that little bit of horsepower can do.

A senior engineer can work through a hard problem assigned to a junior engineer, resulting in a well-implemented hard feature and a less junior engineer. Just because a junior engineer is working on it doesn’t mean by default it’s an easy problem—how are you going to grow your engineers otherwise?

Yeah, but the original point you were responding to was endorsing the idea that “you should invest time in optimizing/performance last, and focus on making something people want to use first.” I’m saying your point that videogames have to be performant at the end is irrelevant to the point at hand because that’s exactly what the games industry does, they prototype without care to optimization to make something worth optimizing—i.e. something internal stakeholders reasonably believed there would be a market for.

Yeah, but even in the old days the developers would still be prototyping. Internal stakeholders are still stakeholders, and it’s developers optimizing for things other than speed. Nintendo devs famously build nothing until Mario’s jump (the MVP) feels right.

Ehhh, I don't think your example disproves the idea you're responding to. Perhaps video games MUST deliver performance in the end, but often game prototypes are not performant at all for the sake of rapid experimentation, and are only optimized towards the end of development once all the systems are set in stone...which is what's being advocated for here.

Sublicensing is what legally enables things like rich media link previews (the kind you see on Facebook and Twitter) or APIs to exist. Yeah, theoretically they could use that to sell content, but in practice it's generally used to make the web more interoperable.

If you think about it, it kind of makes sense. OP is in a situation where he haas much more money than time, however due to his position in the world, he can see many opportunities--generally this is true for professional investors, too. For a normal person, pursuing one means there is an opportunity cost, but for an investor it makes sense to buy a slice of the action in an opportunity they believe in. Being a proper investor (mentoring, introductions) also takes time, so that's another disincentive from OP's perspective to being a founder vs a funder.

Also, investors have things thing about inventing the future by funding it. Generally, individually or as a group, they'll decide something is going to be the next big thing and start cultivating deals in that area. One you can see happening in real time is space: Randomly in the last couple of years, investors have put together huge funds around space ventures, even though serious commercialization still seems to be a ways off. Even OP referenced it in his blog post.

As for why a founder vs a compensated product owner? Because a founder presumably has spent a lot of time thinking about the problem and is intrinsically motivated to solve it--so much so that they've done all the legwork to assemble a team and gather enough data to be investment-worthy. If as an investor you're wrong about the opportunity in this space, it's a whole lot of risk and cost and time you don't have to take on yourself. By advertising a pot of money, instead of searching for the right person, the hope is that the right person and team will eventually come to your door.

I went to school for CS, and decided to add on a BBA since I could do it basically for free. Prior to school, I was extensively read in the category of books you describe. While you're not wrong that you can get most knowledge from reading famous business books and using some intuition, you also don't know what you don't know, and that little bit has outsized value because it is important, non-intuitive, and hard to find--I suspect it's the secret sauce everyone keeps to themselves and isn't talked about by virtue of being relatively boring. Sure, you could read it in any old textbook, but you probably wouldn't think to.

I'm not sure what you're trying to get at...are you trying to say business people are smarter than OP gives them credit for?

"I very quickly realized that" <- Implying a prior assumption that was proven false

"very smart people" <- The set of very smart people OP has met, which hinges on perspective

"often" <- The key phrase here, implying that it is generally (but not always) true

"have very little knowledge of finance and business." <- The assumption at hand

I'm assuming OP thinks of STEM people as the definition of "very smart," based on his description of his degree, and his feelings about coding. OP may have assumed that since his knowledge is comparatively trivial for STEM people to learn, the knowledge might be widespread among what he thinks of as smart people, and was surprised when this valuable knowledge wasn't. In my experience, the average kind of person I'm assuming OP would consider "very smart" is either averse to business, or didn't bother learning business because it took time away from the hard problems they were more interested in, even though they easily could have.

More generally, the total set of obviously and profoundly smart people is bound to be (much) bigger than the set of obviously and profoundly intelligent people with knowledge of finance. Are there smart business people? Absolutely. But it's probably a small percentage when compared with the total set of Very Smart People. Also, at least in my school, the smartest people tend to go into harder disciplines, so that may further dilute the numbers of finance knowledge among the pool of Very Smart People.

So, there are multiple ways OP's statement can be true without being specifically about the capacity of intelligent people to learn finance through study or experience.

> Marketing class- 2 lessons, if you are going to put years into a project, do a marketing plan. Also, learned how incredibly important marketing is.

This was exactly why I chose to do a BBA alongside my CS degree. If I was gonna make something, I wanted to make sure it would have some impact on the real world. I tell people: CS is a tool for solving problems, but business is a tool for finding them.

I think you're misunderstanding what he's trying to say. He's not saying that knowing finance has anything to do with being smart--if anything, it's the opposite: Of the people he considers smart, he noticed knowledge of finance isn't widespread. Perhaps the average smart person doesn't find the problem interesting enough.

For what it's worth, I was one of those people. I didn't go for my undergrad until 8 years into my adult life (I'm a veteran), but I had done extensive reading about business to the point that most of my BBA (which I was taking as a bonus alongside CS) felt like review. Except for finance. I knew the basics, but even undergrad courses revealed that my knowledge was very shallow. I think it's just something that people don't expect to have that much complexity. I wouldn't have thought to learn it if I hadn't been forced to take it in school, but I took as many finance courses as I could once I realized the knowledge deficit.

Is finance hard? The sophisticated stuff can be, but generally in comparison to engineering it's not. But nonetheless, nearly none of the computer scientists in my class or in my professional circles have bothered to learn...probably because they're more interested in compilers ;)