Would e-commerce have evolved without JeffB or smartphones be invented without Apple? Probably, but it might have taken longer, or they might have been invented in another country, greatly hurting America’s prospects. To this date Amazon has the best e-commerce logistics on the planet.
Doing things ahead of its time, by gathering the right people and enough money, is a very unique skill. Couple that with being well positioned for a certain “inevitable” innovation and that limits the number of people even more.
There’s also a compounding effect. Walking backwards from humanity’s global tech maxima, if every key innovation was late by a few years, the overall maxima might be late by hundreds of years, maybe worse. Maybe humanity ends due to an asteroid impact because we didn't get advanced enough to protect ourselves in time.
In other words: it’s hard to believe that there’s something intrinsic about Newton, Galileo, etc. that would have fundamentally prevented the arc of human history and knowledge had they not done what they did. The much more parsimonious explanation is that “great men” were in the right place at the right time to apply their (undisputed!) talents.
But isn’t this part of the point? How many times did we not get the right person in the right place? How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday?
Is it surprising that we want to believe in "great men"?
SpaceX is an entirely unoriginal company (really good execution, though). The genius of SpaceX is in the systems which enable that execution. It's not even really a particularly significant company.
Founders are right person, right place, right time, and _place and time are more important than the person_. Why do so many come from America? Because _place_. The right place from about 1750 to maybe 1835 was northern England; the Bay Area has had a really good run.
Brian Eno, as often, has a word for it: "scenius". https://austinkleon.com/2017/05/12/scenius/
There's a large SpaceX office down the road from where I live (Redmond, WA) and a fair few of my ex-MSFT friends now work there, and they call say the same thing to me: "SpaceX's successes are despite Elon's involvement, not because of it".
I just still don't know if I want to work there or not. BlueOrigin gave me an offer for an avionics position years ago, but the commute down to Kent, WA was a deal-killer.
And it turns out, editing, combining multiple things together where the sums are greater than its parts, is perhaps the single most important criteria for greatness.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_th...
So all of these founders did commericalize and create consumer products to make them more mass market, but the raw tech was there beforehand to make it happen.
Bear in mind, the iPhone running a fully capable desktop class browser was jaw dropping. BlackBerry management were absolutely convinced the demo must have been faked. It's only when they got hold of actual devices that they realised it was genuine and even then it took a while for it to sink in just how far behind they were. It took Microsoft almost 3 years to figure that out.
This is often discounted because it's not obvious to the user unless you're familiar with specific aspects of the technology, but in terms of the capabilities it enables as a founding technology it's night and day. This is why Android ate their lunch as well. Although it was started as a BlackBerry clone, the fact that it was a full Linux kernel under the hood positioned it to become a solid platform for networked, isolated, fully memory managed, pre-emptively multitasking background OS services, and isolated user applications, with modern power management.
BB, Palm and Pocket PC were hobbled legacy platforms that might superficially emulate the UI of a modern smartphone but could never actually function and compete at the same level.
In other words, the personal characteristics, family members, etc. of the supposedly interchangeable Great Man do have a unique effect on history that would be different if a different Great Man had fulfilled the role.
Napoleon’s wives (the first of which couldn’t give him a child) and brothers (who were installed as local kings) are a good example. I’m sure you can think of many other more recent ones.
"Probably, but it might have taken longer, or they might have been invented in another country" Both of those are speculation, and are also highly unlikely. It might have also happened more quickly. The US had a handful of ecommerce companies in the .com boom which were right on Amazon's tail. The limiting factor was demand which is ultimately a form of incentive.
The limiting factor is not "great men" who are competent enough to get the job done, it's having a large enough pool of resources in the hands of someone or some institution which can decide to invest it in that thing. Competence doesn't have much to do with it. A severely incompetent person with a will and a large enough pool of resources can still get it done with a little luck. Musk had a will and a large enough pool of resources.
He was one of the first people whose life's wealth had almost no coupling to the pre-silicon valley US economy and who became rich after the internet had proliferated. He's not particularly competent, but he was able to dream a little bigger than previous generations of filthy rich people. His wealth wasn't tied to oil or the automobile industry, so he was able to see the value of moving off of it.
I think another factor that confuses people is that IMO society has a speed of information. Government policy tends to take a couple years to filter through, and then on top of that, there are statistical limits on the rate at which an individual or company can react to that, and re-channel money to appropriately take advantage of the new conditions. People seem to think that as soon as a government policy takes effect, things should start changing, but think of the mass of our society... the people, the buildings, the equipment... that all has inertia. Things don't happen in the real world at the speed they do on the internet.
Many supposed "great visionaries" simply formed a team that collectively had the vision that we attribute to the leader.
Steve Jobs had Jony Ive
George Lucas had Ralph McQuarrie
Christopher Nolan had Hans Zimmer
Etc..
I'm sure there's many more who's names aren't public enough to have become general knowledge, but the point is that great generals don't win wars by themselves. They have trusted officers, which in turn have trusted men. The figurehead is just that. They may be important in the sense that they attract the best officers and the bravest soldiers, but in the end, they could not "do it on their own" in any sense.
The effect of the opportunity cost is often forgotten. By choosing to channel resources into one area you are not funding others.
What Jobs did very well at Apple was kill some stuff that weren't that useful ( Opendoc is a classic example ) and focus resources things were. But you can't see the road not travelled.
In general if you look at history you see periods of stagnation around the world at various times - and I don't think that was a result of lack of 'great people' - I think how societies are organised has more impact. Governance is important.
https://amazonuk.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
https://press.aboutamazon.com/1998/4/amazon-com-acquires-thr...
my problem is that this perspective confuses together individuals and systems
no great men exist in isolation, some name takes most of the credit but they're all but a sum of their circumstances, which in all cases include other top people who never get to be as famous
strict clarity of this is extra important now that fully autonomous 'systems' are taking off, which makes them even more likely to be confused with individuals:
who invented the slate-computer (smartphone): Apple Corporation
then a whole history of apple as if they were a person whose father as another person called Steve Jobs (and their mother was Steve W?) or whatever
Take out Jobs, and there is no iPhone, or even an OSX to base it on. It took the competition years to catch up, and that's bearing in mind they knew they needed to. Prior to the iPhone announcement, Android was going to be a BlackBerry clone.
Or take SpaceX, nobody but Musk was pushing for first stage re-use. Seven years later no other company has landed an orbital class first stage booster, or seems anywhere close to doing so, and that's with the concept absolutely proven. How long would we have to wait for someone to even try without Musk gathering a team and making it happen?
Here's my own Great Founder Theory: I don't think founders matter nearly as much as people in Silicon Valley think they do. They're basically there to give VCs a figure head they can point to and claim some new effort to financialize and monopolize another part of our economy is backed by some brilliant ass hole they found somewhere who started this thing in their garage. There have of course been very intelligent and hard working founders, but imo whether your startup succeeds has much more to do with product market fit and timing than it does with the quality of the founder. Just look at what a shitheel uber had at the beginning.
This reads funny to me since unwittingly you seem to agree to the Great Founder Theory. Product market fit is hard to come by but is relatively easy to recognize. This is the role of VCs. You try to argue that founders are interchangeable but I don’t see it. If anything, VCs are more interchangeable.
The linked page does read like it's passing it off as original thought (whatever that means), but had a quick look at the linked PDF. It doesn't make any attempt to hide the historical and academic context of the Great Man Theory from the reader.
Whole thing might be bullshit, but your comment comes across as overly sneering. Whether it's worth sharing with anyone is a judgement left to the reader.
I didn't read the whole thing, but had a glance at the last chapter in China and learned a few things to look into that I didn't know about before in regards to history there. If the author self-censored to please you, that wouldn't have happened.
Your outrage over someone writing down some thoughts in a structured way and sharing it seems like a waste.
[1] On Natural Maniacs: https://collabfund.com/blog/natural-maniacs/
Thinking that it's impossible to be great seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. As someone once said, "whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right".
I stopped reading past this.
What about that second sentence then?
>What are the origins of institutional health or sclerosis?
When it comes to sclerosis or more tragic decline I guess we'll have to chalk that up to not-so-great successors to truly great founders . . . in theory.
https://samoburja.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Great_Found...
A non-pdf introduction to it here:
https://medium.com/@samo.burja/great-founder-theory-93751e25...
What I really see, at calm time, great man is not important, because just free market work good enough.
But at tough time, great man could save lot of lives, lot of resources.
Same thing works at very large organizations - at lowest levels of hierarchy, general persons are good enough, but on top, need great man.
So idea, that at some scale, need exceptional people.
