My three heroes

Background

It is a bit weird to go to grad school at my age, but I decided to do it anyway. Sometimes when I sit in classes taught by professors such as Prof Shomit Ghose, I realize boy did I take a good call in my life. Shomit guides us through a career mapping journey and as part of that journey, he asked us to write about how our careers can be moulded by three of the best people who we admire personally. I couldn’t finish this on time, because I was an idiot and didn’t plan ahead. I felt so bad that I had to miss the class and assignment (I know it’s weird to feel like this) that the entire morning today I spent on retrospecting about what the hell had I done. I had read about Sam Altman’s productivity blog post and suddenly it hit me. Let me start with making a priority list and that led me to writing this post. I had to submit a hard copy but that ship has sailed. I do improvise so I thought why not write a blog post about it and here I am.

The assignment

The focus of this assignment is on three industry leading figures whose careers you want to emulate or learn from. Given my penchant for startups and engineering, I decided to write about three people who have been my inspiration in the tech industry.

Marc Andreesen

Marc Andreesen needs no introduction. He wrote Netscape which pretty much changed the world of internet as we know it. What stands out to me in Marc’s early career is how Netscape came about. The gensis starts with Mossaic

When Marc and his team wrote Mosaic in 1990-93 the graphical user interface was just starting to take off. Windows 3.1 had just then come out and Mosaic was the first graphical browser to incorporate text and images.

However, this didn’t happen accidentally, Marc was privy to the key events happening in the industry at that time. He had interned at IBM which was the holy grail of tech companies back then and had first hand experience of what was emerging as the internet. He also interned at the AIX group which was porting SGI APIs. This was bleeding edge stuff at the time. The idea of building Mosaic came about as a result of deep work in these companies and areas. It didn’t happen all of a sudden by a shower thought.

This is my key takeway. For a key technology insight to come about, you need to be neck deep in the trenches of the bleeding edge of the industry. Any cursory involvement is not enough.

Elon Musk

It would be a cliche if I said I want to emulate Musk’s career. I want to emulate his work ethic. What I have learned by reading his biography is that he works intensely on problems one at a time. Though it appears to the world that he is multi tasking, he is in fact working deeply on one problem after another sequentially.

He is not distracted and he does not lose focus. I wish I had the fortune of learning about these personalities when I was young but I callously wasted my youth in cushy jobs and first class travel.

After his initial success with Paypal, Musk took on building a rocket and happened to also build an electric car. He did this completely from scratch, learning from first principles the engineering behind rockets and electric cars.

That’s my key takeway. Learn everything from first principles and challenge the status quo. Not for the sake of challenging but truly understand the first principles approach and practice it.

This is proving to be way harder than expected. In essence, I cannot map out Musk’s career and emulate the same. I can however emulate his work ethic and that’s what I have been doing.

Warren Buffett

Legendary investor of all time. Loved by almost everyone in the world, and whose career is pretty much an open book. Warren bought his first stock at the age of 11 and I had no idea what a stock was when I was 11. The only commonality I share with Warren is that I used to visit stock brokers in my middle school to drop off checks and as I would sit there and wait for the checks to be credited or whatever, I would be in awe of these brokers talking over multiple phones and making trades. We didn’t even have a TV in our house.

I got back to investing in my mid twenties and started following Warren around the same time. Warren’s career is an anomaly. He bought a company along with Charlie and he just stuck with it. He was already enormously wealthy when he purchased Berkshire. So it is really hard to emulate that aspect of his career.

However, what I wish to incorporate is his managerial ethics. For instance, Warren barely interferes in the working of his companies. He trusts and gives his managers full autonomy to run their companies despite owning a majority stake. To be hands off something that you own is incredibly hard. Yet, Warren has shown that it can be done and he has shown incredible success in his portfolio compnaies.

This runs contrary to Founder mode espoused by Paul Graham. Founder mode especially states how founders should know every underpinning of their company. This places a huge onus on the founders to be hands on and dedicate almost all their time to the operations of a company.

To summarise, I am shaping my career trajectory over the next 5-10 years by incorporating elements of the above personalities. Musk’s work ethic , the Warren’s delegation skills and Marc’s ability to build on a world changing technology arc.