Thanks Paul for the feedback, and for the reminder that we are criticizing ideas and not people :-)
The thing with academic papers was really interesting, and gave me pause. I would point out two similarities:
The set of all papers submitted to a specific conference is a lot more homogeneous than the set of all papers period. Similarly, the set of all entrepreneurs who get VC funding is a lot more homogenous than the set of all people who think about starting companies. So the statement “performance within some limited subset is mostly due to chance” isn’t necessarily conflicting with the idea that there is such a thing as entrepreneurial skill/paper quality.
Instead of drawing a lesson that there is no such thing as skill we might conclude that acceptance to a conference or having an IPO is just not a very good indicator of skill.
I also agree that this is largely a quantitative disagreement. I’ve spent the last year being surrounded by people who believe that variance in startups is completely determined by the founder’s skill, and that gives me a framing for what I write.
Thanks Paul for the feedback, and for the reminder that we are criticizing ideas and not people :-)
The thing with academic papers was really interesting, and gave me pause. I would point out two similarities:
The set of all papers submitted to a specific conference is a lot more homogeneous than the set of all papers period. Similarly, the set of all entrepreneurs who get VC funding is a lot more homogenous than the set of all people who think about starting companies. So the statement “performance within some limited subset is mostly due to chance” isn’t necessarily conflicting with the idea that there is such a thing as entrepreneurial skill/paper quality.
Instead of drawing a lesson that there is no such thing as skill we might conclude that acceptance to a conference or having an IPO is just not a very good indicator of skill.
I also agree that this is largely a quantitative disagreement. I’ve spent the last year being surrounded by people who believe that variance in startups is completely determined by the founder’s skill, and that gives me a framing for what I write.