arjun on Nostr: @naval: If you’re ending up in Forbes 30 under 30 or on the cover of magazines, ...

@naval: If you’re ending up in Forbes 30 under 30 or on the cover of magazines, that’s not conducive to being a good founder.

All the value comes from a few hundred genuine, brilliant tinkerers who are there for the love of the game. They’re there for the love of the craft. They’re there because they’re creating something that they want to see exist.

I genuinely believe Elon when he says he wants to die on Mars.

And so these kinds of people—Ilya Sutskever, the genius behind OpenAI, and Greg Brockman and others, obviously, and Sam Altman—these are people who have been working at the edge of their knowledge to try to figure out something new for decades. They are not there to be famous. Fame is a byproduct.

And honestly, anyone who’s on this stage, like me, talking about this—you shouldn’t trust 100%. We’re not the real deal. The real deal, the real power, the real knowledge, the real wealth, the real creativity derives from a small number of modern, you could call them scientist inventors—the new Thomas Edisons, the Henry Fords, the Nikola Teslas.

Interviewer: And who are they?

@naval: Who are the new ones? They’re people you’ve never heard of. They’re that geeky kid standing in the corner at the AI hackathon who’s shipping something that you can barely even understand or describe. You can find a lot of them on Twitter, but good luck sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

By the time they’re known and they’re famous, then maybe, like Elon, they still have ambition and they still keep driving. But they’re not the true builders underneath.