>It is a fun read on Godel no doubt - but I think when it comes to startups things can be phrased in a more > straight forward manner.
>> What is that magic wellspring of value that year after year creates these huge opportunities out of nowhere?
>Complexity is unidirectional. People move on, rationale is lost, and increasingly the bulk of institutional >knowledge grows to be dogma.

These are good points, and some organization certainly become inefficient/chaotic with age. Yet do keep in mind there are brutally efficient corporations that are extremely good at extracting value just by repeating what they already do. thats bread and butter of F500. Going to extreme evil as example - how Halliburton can extract billions of dollars in what feels like an instant from a newly occupied country they never done business with? Thats power of their formalization. they know what contractors to hire, what officials to bribe, and all these 1001 things they need to do to "make spice flow" in no time.

My point is to contrast that repeatable and scalable power of formalization of legacy companies to almost free form exploration of startup. You see startup kids doing totally insane things- trying to create processes and structures so they look like "big corporation", or failing to create them when they absolutely need to start formalizing whats working, etc.

>Additionally, head counts don't naturally go down, people don't automate themselves out of a job and neither do ?>they take kindly to being automated. Change becomes bad.

very good point.

>What I'm trying to say is that Orkut was less passonate about it and had his creativity and motivation stifled compared to Mark.
>Mark obsessed over his project and had everything to gain. Orkut on the other hand - What advantage was there for him in building his project from within Google? None. And not much to gain, just a promotion.

thats pretty brutal on poor Orkut :) I would be careful here just to say we dont know how motivated or not he was at that time. From what i seen at that time he seem to be rolling out updates pretty quick, it was active and clearly passionate development. You might be right that if he tried "a little bit harder" he might have gotten better result. Yet just the same i'm not going to be surprised that all the minefields Orkut/Friendster/Myspace managed to blow up themselves on were critical insights (== discovery of new formal system) that helped Mark avoid these pitfalls. and of course that was also big part of explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVIhUVid4fA

>It is not a lack of information. It is more Kafkaesque. Employees had the knowledge and couldn't freely execute >on it -- organizational complexity kills joy.

That what i sort of argue against in that and previous essays. Employees are far too busy making sure that stuff they already got works. they joined 9-5 jobs because they like being in predictable field, with no surprises and defining their own success as just repeating what they doing over and over. JWZ said it best "we joined netscape to build a great company, those who came later wanted to join a great company". Any startup that plans to grow up past its humble beginnings needs to understand that duality and understand what motivates its people past first 100 employes. Its the whole difference between discovering new domains and formalizing them for revenue extraction.