[mushufasa]

The people who were willing to work for a risky startup with a vast vision are willing to work for another risky startup with a vast vision again.

The reverse causation seems like a compelling explanation: innovators built Uber and AirBnB, rather than Uber and AirBnB built innovators (as the title implies).

[dasil003]

It's a little of both, and some other factors as well. People joining risky ventures with vast visions all the time, in all kinds of places, you just never hear about the ones that fail. And for the companies that do succeed, especially in SV, there is always a post-hoc founder story told retroactively in order to keep the troops motivated and investor money flowing. If you actually look at FAANG they all started with very focused products with the vision scaling just ahead of their successes to propel hypergrowth for a long period of time. And doing so, btw, takes a lot more than just innovators, it takes an army of people who are mostly focusing on the right things at the right time.

The advantage of ex-Uber, ex-Airbnb folks is not that they are more innovative—it's that they have experience in solving the organizational problems of doubling the size of a company over and over and over again within a very short time frame. If you only get people who are good at making innovative small-scale projects then they'll hit a wall when the organizational challenges of hypergrowth suck all the productivity and alignment out of the team. If you get people who only have experience operating at huge scale they won't be able to prioritize short term goals needed to get and maintain traction.

[mcguire]

What exactly does "risk" mean in this situation: former employees of a successful unicorn, presumably armed with their payouts, start new companies with the backing of a VC fund, also started by former employees of the successful unicorn?