Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I’m drawing a blank. Go for it. In Paul Graham’s legendary 2012 essay, Startups = Growth, he’s talking about how the whole thing you need to do as a startup is focus on next week’s growth. He then says, “In theory this sort of hill-climbing could get a startup into trouble. They could end up on a local maximum. But in practice that never happens. Having to hit a growth number every week forces founders to act, and acting versus not acting is the high bit of succeeding. Nine times out of ten, sitting around strategizing is just a form of procrastination. Whereas founders’ intuitions about which hill to climb are usually better than they realize. Plus the maxima in the space of startup ideas are not spiky and isolated. Most fairly good ideas are adjacent to even better ones.” I just thought, I don’t know. It just jumped off the page at me that Judy, who has almost certainly never read any of Paul Graham’s writings, had this same insight. I don’t try to see the entire mountain at once. I just try to focus on the hill right in front of me. And that hill is adjacent to a bigger and more interesting hill. I’m so glad you brought this up. I was thinking about Judy as this incredible software developer, who became a founder of a company, this incredible business person, and didn’t follow any of the MBA rules.…

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