Nat Friedman: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. There's a quote about Napoleon that if he could have been in every single theater of every single battle he was part of, that he would have never lost a battle. I was talking to somebody who worked with you at GitHub and she emphasized to me, and this is like really remarkable to me, that even the applications are already being shipped out to engineers how much of the actual suggestions and the actual design came from you directly, which is kind of remarkable to me that as CEO you would have. Yeah, you can probably also find people you can talk to who think that was terrible. But the question is always: does that scale? And the answer is it does not scale. The experience that I had as CEO was I was terrified all the time that there was someone in the company who really knew exactly what to do and had excellent judgment, but because of cultural forces that person wasn't empowered. That person was not allowed to exercise their judgment and make decisions. And so when I would think and talk about this, that was the fear that it was coming from. They were in some consensus environment where their good ideas were getting whittled down by lots of conversations with other people and a politeness and a desire not to micromanage. So we were ending up with some kind of average thing. And I would rather have more high variance outcomes where you either get something that's excellent because it is the expressed vision of a really good auteur or you get a disaster and it didn't work and now you know it didn't work and you can start over. I would rather have those more high variance outcomes and I think it's a worthy trade. Okay, let's talk about AI. What percentage of the economy is basically text to text?…

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