Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
Paul Graham writes excellent essays. This one caught my attention.
That’s the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work that’s beneath them. Big companies try to hire the right person for the job. Startups win because they don’t—because they take people so smart that they would in a big company be doing “research,” and set them to work instead on problems of the most immediate and mundane sort. Think Einstein designing refrigerators.
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That reminds me of a quote. I think it was from someone at Apple but I could be wrong – either way it’s a great quote.
“We don’t hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people, so they will tell us what to do.”