flâneur

How to get lucky and land top 1% career opportunities

mattsmusings.substack.com · 1,379 words · saved by 1 readers

In 1995, a PhD student at a private university on the west coast was assigned to give a tour to a prospective enrollee. While their initial interaction was nothing to write home about, the two would eventually become friends and go on to found a small startup in the garage of a mutual friend with a simple mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The 2 friends? Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The small startup? Google. And that mutual friend? The late Susan Wojcicki, who would go on to become the CEO of YouTube. If you have an inkling of interest in business or technology, you’ve probably heard the silicon valley trope - the visionary 20-something founders, the early days of the company in a garage, the breakout success and IPO, and the journey to a trillion dollar market cap. Many successful companies - Meta, Amazon, Google, Nvidia, Apple - have followed some version of this path. Hindsight is 20/20, and it’s easy in retrospect to assume

In 1995, a PhD student at a private university on the west coast was assigned to give a tour to a prospective enrollee. While their initial interaction was nothing to write home about, the two would eventually become friends and go on to found a small startup in the garage of a mutual friend with a simple mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The 2 friends? Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The small startup? Google. And that mutual friend? The late Susan Wojcicki, who would go on to become the CEO of YouTube. If you have an inkling of…

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