There's a shitty book called The Myth of the Garage whose principle asset is that it's short. You would think that it would talk a bit about how the visionaries of the tech industry didn't labor alone, had massive support, were often rich as fuck to begin with, etc. Nope. It's about how they all struggled alone, penniless, full of virtue, FOR A LONG TIME so if you wanna break through you just need to buck up little camper and work three times as hard like Jeff Bezos did!

But if you dig into it with so much as a caviar spoon you discover that it's rich fucks all the way down. "Hey look! A couple college kids came up with a 'browser' in their spare time - nobody could ever do that! They must be geniuses! Especially since they're hanging out with Jim Clark, let's buy that shit for four billion."

The lack of self-awareness is leaving such a vacuum behind I'm worried a black hole might appear.

This is Ben Horowitz.

Yes, of "Andreessen Horowitz."

I want you to go look up his book. It's called "the hard thing about hard things." I want you to read a sample. I want you to go through the frontispiece, the table of contents, and just make it to the first page. You only need a paragraph or so. He goes on. For a long time. I read the whole thing. But that one little paragraph is all you need.

I want you to recognize that when you're partnered with Ben Horowitz, you are always the self-aware one. Which results in exercises in "no it's the children who are wrong" misadventures such as this.

picture is from here