Mentorship

Ali Partovi posted on X about the Cursor pre-history, explaining the untold story behind the success of Michael Truel and Arman Sanger. You don’t become a billionaire at 25 by stashing four leave clovers under your pillow. Success that early is predicated on years of mentorship. It takes a village to raise a child and that narrative gets eclipsed by the fame and vanity of net worth headlines.

Take Zuck for an example. The entire gen-z world only views him as the 19-year old founder who built Facebook from his dorm, and not the young experimentalist that had an acquisition offer from Microsoft at 18 for his Synapse music player (which he co-built with Quora’s Adam D’Angelo). They declined the million dollar offer, released the software for free, and went to college. It’s alarming how many people are attempting to mimic Zuck’s early life and still don’t know about this. Refusing to start working in your late teens is different to turning down job offers. One is a gift, the other is siloing yourself around confirmation bias.

Similarly, Michael’s mentors discovered him quite young, he was only 18. As an MIT undergrad and mathematician he’s clearly very intelligent and has solid problem solving skills which are imperative during the initial phase of the idea maze. Untangling complex ideas is a solid strategy to finding the right problem to work on. The gnarly and hairy problems are often the ones with least competition, and in turn the most opportunity (if tractable).

Hence I’m on my search. I want to be surrounded by the smartest people I know with good hearts. Right now I feel trapped between ego and vanity.

Those who talk about the what before the why.

Those who talk about the raise before the impact.

Those who think about the Lex Friedman interview before they’ve even built a product.

My search must continue.