In chess, we can rank players by ability (Elo) and the higher-ranked players reliably beat the lower-ranked ones. This is skill. On the other end, you have games like roulette, where you can't really be "good" and it wouldn't make sense to rank the best players. This is chance.
Startups are somewhere in the middle and intuitively closer to poker. There's an extreme amount of short-term variance, but we know who the good players are, and over sufficient timescales they outcompete everyone. This explains why people we think are mediocre sometimes have early success, and why incredibly bright people often struggle to get anything off the ground.
In other words, the only mechanism of justice is time. Success requires being relentlessly persistent over the course of a few decades.
The frustrating thing is that it's really hard to learn lessons about persistence by reading books or watching interviews, because it's not something you can glean from outcomes. The most useful thing about working with excellent people is seeing their marginal behavior, instead of just the absolute outcome.
It turns out that to be well-read, you have to read a lot, and to read a lot, you have to do things at the margin like sitting down with a book on Friday evening instead of doomscrolling. It turns out that to go from being overweight to being lean, you have to cut calories, which translates into marginal behavior like turning down dessert after a nice dinner. And yet, despite the fact that this is all intuitive, we all delude ourselves that there's some way to achieve the absolute outcome we want without these changes in marginal behavior. It's only when we see someone else actively making these tradeoffs over an uncomfortable period of time that we internalize that this is a valid way to live.
One of the broader trends that worries me is the extent to which younger people feel that success is a product of luck. Short-form slop makes this worse, because the people who are easiest to understand and imitate are the ones whose success looks like a single event. Their marginal behavior is simple to replicate. You can buy the same speculative, loss-generating, Jane-Street-is-on-the-other-side-of-this-bet financial assets they bought.
What you can't easily replicate is the marginal behavior of someone who has been working on the same problem for eight years with nothing to show for it. One of these is a lottery ticket and the other is persistence. But from the outside, the outcome seems the same, and that confuses people.
Understanding the marginal behavior of extreme persistence is really difficult. What does it mean to do something for eight years, not succeed, have everyone else label you a failure, and then eventually, in year nine, see incredible traction? What does it feel like at the end of five years or seven years? How do you explain your work at dinner parties when, on a five-year timescale, it seems abundantly clear that you've lost?
People celebrate the virtues of contrarianism, but the marginal behavior here is looking really stupid for a long time. How comfortable are we with that?