[paulsutter]

It's really hard to build a company. It's really admirable to build a successful tech company, no matter how lofty or straightforward the project. The Instagram guys are also heroes to me.

Zip2, Elon's first company, didn't invent anything new or solve any hard problems either (it started out as an online yellow pages). But it was really important that Elon learned from that process. And I know that he enjoyed it, I remember meeting with him when they were 10 guys in one room. And Zip2 was worth $300M to Altavista, which is how Elon paid for the Maclaren mentioned in the recent video.

I'm also glad that Peter Thiel and Max Levchin and others have started to create social pressure for us to think about how to do big things that really benefit society. And maybe we only need to feel that pressure after we've done one or two successful things. As individuals it's also ok to ignore it and say hey I really enjoy building companies and don't need to change the world in a huge way.

[confluence]

Did Elon get screwed by the VCs during the formation and sale of Zip2? Apparently his brother, their friend and Elon got diluted out during later funding rounds. They squeezed his take down to a "measly" $20 million.

At least that's what I've read (it's also probably the reason he started all over again with X.com which eventually morphed into PayPal).