"Anecdotally, Dropbox was founded by two guys who had just met each other."
No, not anecdotal. While I appreciate Paul Graham's cherry picked examples just like the next person, having looked at the history of hundreds of companies, it is all over the map. In general, you can't "create" success, you can simple try to avoid or mitigate failure. "People" make great companies, by being great about making it work.
But, sadly, and I really mean, sadly, monetarily successful companies (which may not be great companies) are for the most part simply created by having a product people want to buy. You can have a staff of imbeciles selling sugar to children.
There is a tremendous urge among intelligent people to reduce things to 'first principles.'
And, of those first principles, to think of them as maths, or applied maths.
On this topic 'e/acc' I'll stick more to epistemology, ontology, and even taxonomy.
Personally, I enjoy that people are even getting excited about this concept socially, since, chaos or long-term planning aside, activating people to push things to be faster, simpler, etc. is a strong win while we work out everything else (please stop enabling anything that is related to physical paperwork).
&nb... (read more)