Byrne Hobart: belief

Transcript context

…You'll also keep track of your bank accounts. That's the dress itself but I also want to ask about the other characteristics. You had this really interesting point in that blog post about how when you try to scout for talent when the talent is young, you're over indexing for parental involvement. I'm curious, if you had to identify somebody who had to be under the age of 18 or under the age of 20, what is the metric you're looking at that least indexes for parental involvement where they're being forced or encouraged by their parents to do it? I think the closest you could get is something that is either totally illegible to the parent's understanding of status or something that is actively low status. It’s hard to enumerate those and not just get swamped in — should this thing be low status? high status? Is it actually terrible to say that you ever want to hire someone who was really good at x for some value of x? The origin of that point was that I was arguing that when you look at people who are at some percentile and they're in their 20s or 30s, a lot of it has to be that they have some combination of talent and have tried really hard. There's probably been some element of luck but over time the luck starts to wash out hopefully. But the younger you go, and this is probably just my experience of having kids, if you talk to your kids every day about multiplication they will start doing multiplication at a pretty early age and it's not that they are really really smart and they got to multiplication a couple years early. It's that you push them in that direction and they are able to do it early. So the earlier you go the more you are over-indexing on what the parents did, what they emphasized and also what they told the kids was just part of the script. I remember anecdotes about people who grew up in lower middle class or below circumstances but would have one distant relative who owned a business and that made them aware that they could own a business and this is a thing they could do. It's part of the script now. That wasn't the only reason that they would have started business but it could be a reason that they decided to do that when they did. And you have to imagine that for everyone who had one uncle who owned a scrap dealer or something maybe there are five or ten or fifty people who grew up in similar circumstances with a similar level of innate ability and just didn't have anyone in their social circle who demonstrated to them that this was something you could actually do. Getting back to the talent identification problem, part of my thesis there was that it's really hard. And it's getting harder now that you have Y Combinator going after the relatively young talent versus what the medium VC was going after when YC started. Stuff like Pioneer and Emergent Ventures is going even younger. The younger you get, the more it is this luck driven thing that is about what they got exposed to, with the exception of prodigies. I'd like to think that if I encountered an eight-year-old Mozart I would be able to identify this person as just an extraordinary talent where even if their parents were making them practice ten hours a day, they couldn't be that good without talent. ear-old Mozart I would be able to identify this person as just an extraordinary talent where even if their parents were making them practice ten hours a day, they couldn't be that good without talent. And maybe something similar with the Polgar Sisters where if I encountered a six-year-old who can routinely beat me at chess and so I google some chess books and then go back and try to beat them again, and they're actually better and they're laughing at me and at some point you decide that this is actually natural talent. For a lot of other domains, there's just so much room for parents to push one thing and do some combination of their kids talent and their own emphasis to get their kids really good at it and that's very hard to adjust for. Especially because if you ask the parents they're going to underestimate how much they overemphasize things because to them this is just a normal thing that everyone should be interested in. So you won't get a good signal from asking parents and then you won't get a good signal from asking other people because they don't know how this family spends time at home. If the median family has more YouTube and Netflix time and less math practice time, that family's just going to assume their behavior is normal.…

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