Nat Friedman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Theoretically those two things are consistent, right? You could have very tight control over governance while the code itself is open source. And this happens in programming languages. Languages are eventually set in stone and then advanced by committee. But yeah, certainly you have these benign dictators of languages who enforce the strong set of ideas they have, a vision, master plan. That would be the argument that's most on Dylan's side. Hey, it works for languages why can't it work for end user applications? I think the thing you need to do though to build a good end user application is not only have a good aesthetic and idea, but somehow establish a tight feedback loop with a set of users. Where you can give them – Dwarkesh, try this. Oh my gosh. Okay, that's not what you need. Doing that is so hard, even in a company where you've total hierarchical control of the team in theory and everyone really wants the same thing and everyone's salary and stock options depend on the product being accepted by these users. It still fails many times in that scenario. Then additionally doing that in the context of open source, it's just slightly too hard. The reason you acquired GitHub, as you said, is that there seems to be complementarity between Microsoft’s and GitHub's missions. And I guess that's been proven out over the last few years. Should there be more of these collaborations and acquisitions? Should there be more tech conglomerates? Would that be good for the system?…

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