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I understand your point. As I said, I would have made the same point when I was half my age. I understand it all too well. Younger me would not have believed older me either. I'm not overestimating my own prowess. I've done it before, moved into management, executive, and now back into primarily technical / tech leadership. I've had multiple perspectives on this. I've also had plenty of technically exceptional employees who could, in abstract, do the technical part of this as well. What you're clear underestimating is the organizational and human part of this. You can't just hire a CEO, and hope they'll magically solve it for you, anymore than you can't just hire a random engineering grad and hope they'll build you a self-driving car. And as I said, simply handing someone money, no matter how good they are and how much money you hand them will rarely result in any important technical problems solved without the right organizational structures. And while there are some technically hard problems, like self-driving cars, that's not the majority of unicorns. I've also worked at a company that solved a problem of similar complexity as several of the ones you listed (with about 20 employees, and about a decade of funding). That one had *both* hard technical and human problems. Without solving the human problems, it wouldn't have had the right 20 employees, nor the decade of sustained funding. And those employees would not have solved the right set of hard problems to make an economically-viable entity. You're completely missing where the hard parts of making a successful organization lie, or why they're hard. |
There's a lot of wriggle room with the goalposts here, as they say it's basically impossible to falsify your statement, since you can shift the burden on the proclaimed "hard" bits (i.e. "human problems"). I'll just re-iterate the point made by others that what people normally mean by "10 motivated, aligned high-quality people" is probably not what you purported to mean. Normally "10 motivated, aligned high-quality people" exists. You claim it doesn't even exist in practice.
The rest of the discussion is just people talking past each other.