> I only interviewed at one other company and they asked stupid questions like, “name the seven layers of the OSI Networking Stack,” or something that you'd pull out of a textbook, not things that were actually interesting.

Feels a bit ironic now. The one time I interviewed at Google it wasn't necessarily stupid but I don't feel like my ability to build product was ever tested.

> It became a cycle. These smart people would bring more smart people with them and so on. I think we got the whole systems department at UCSB because Urs was a professor there. It was like pulling on a string of talent and getting all the talent attached to it.

I wonder how accessible this "string" is today for most people. I've mostly worked at startups but I was new to the Bay Area and had no network, and it seemed all my coworkers had worked many previous jobs together. Then I left after 6 years and now seems like working at only two companies was perhaps a mistake - the ~50 or so people I worked with are all either at the same companies, or laid off, and aren't really able to "string me along" with them as they move to bigger and brighter things. Maybe in another few years! Or perhaps I'm not good enough to get carried around through startups :P But I'm thinking more along the lines of, the couple of times I was in charge of hiring, I'd open up linkedin or the resume portal, and I'd look at a planet full of hundreds of thousands of probably just fine candidates for the role, five hundred of whom had applied directly, and I'd think damn, I probably should have tried to get into Stanford, when I'm applying blind, I look like just another resume to some overwhelmed hiring manager.

I feel like the opportunity to get into the "Next Google" is simply not available to people like me that came out of Houston from a random college, only spent a couple years in the Bay Area, and now live somewhere else random (Taipei). I'm not really complaining, I do fine, and I'm passionate about the things I do work on, but it's hard to deny the allure of getting to work on something that cool.

> This is a question which I would be curious for someone else to tell me the answer to! The closest thing I can think of is Bitcoin and crypto. I'm pretty sure they would have captured the attention of 21 year old me. What's different about crypto, though, is that it's full of all these get rich quick scammers, which Linux didn't have.

This interview is from 2018, and a few years later there was an absurd boom and crash of cryptocurrencies, where billions of dollars of "value" were created out of thin air in the markets, and then billions more vanished just as quickly. That's very exciting, I agree. But outside of lines going up and down, I'm really curious what someone with Paul's credentials found exciting about cryptocurrencies. I've simply never seen an application that wasn't "database, but worse." All the stuff about liberalizing currency I should think was obviously not going to happen, currencies require the support of governments, if you invent a currency to challenge that government power, governments will simply make your currency illegal, and now your currency is only good for buying drugs and guns, and if your goal is to fight governments, you'll probably find more effective strategies with actual money, or, mutual aid.

So I always figured there was just some really exciting things on the engineering side I'm simply not seeing.