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"Great achievements have become team sports. You need multiple experts in disparate skillsets to achieve a huge business or great discovery."

Whether this is true or not depends somewhat on definitions, but I am going to take the counter-argument.

This is just not the case, you won't be able to evidence it that it is, and it might be this assumption that is holding you back.

In our age, momentum is towards large org-charts, and it is not clear that any greatness comes from it. The foundation of unix came from two people. Craigslist has 50 employees. Pre-acquisition, Twitter had 7000. Facebook has nearly ten times that. There is astonishing talent at the big silicon valley firms yet they reliably fall short of greatness. If lots of well-trained minds was the gateway to greatness, those firms would already have it.

Yet the original concept of twitter was great, and it was such a simple thing. If any of us went back in time to 1995, we'd build a first cut of Twitter in a weekend. But it went undiscovered until all those years later.

In this thread, Walter Bright is taking a hammering on votes for his comment. Yet here is someone who is known to have built complete toolchains for C and C++, also a java-to-native compiler, and his own language that is well-regarded, written variety of articles for journals, built applications. Here is someone who can do great things working alone. (He has also held various dayjobs building other stuff.)

"what drives their ambition is maybe not enough to get others to join their team ... holds me back"

Is it possible that your faith in the team sports model is itself what's holding you back? What could you achieve if you role-play that as being false, and consider how you would organise in light of that? What if you stopped spending energy trying to convert the unworthy, and instead put that energy to be broader yourself. You could still work with people with compatible ideas. Your profile says you are a fpga engineer. The building blocks you work with are some of the most flexible humans have had access to. There will be undiscovered twitters in your space.



Totally agree. “No great discoveries can be done by one man anymore,” seems like demoralization propaganda and it’s impossible to prove regardless.




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