I enjoyed this post. Specifically, the storytelling at the beginning was engaging and made me curious to see where the story goes. I wonder if you could share more about what the “most important” questions were? Do you have an idea how Sam was able to jump to the main issues, what might be his mental model for that? (If I were to guess, I’d pick his reasoning about market that your startup was in and its potential for 10-100x growth)
I would like to read more about the interview itself and your conclusions afterwards. How did you apply the experience from that startup to your next project?
Hello, LessWrong! I’ve been a lurker here for a while but today decided to create an account. I’m not sure why but my guess is that I think it’ll cause me to visit LW more often and—hopefully—improve my thinking.
My first contact with LW happened years ago. I don’t remember how I arrived but I remember being very confused about what’s going on here. The posts were touching on strange and unfamiliar ideas (“alignment, what alignment?”) and I couldn’t follow the reasoning/conversations so I didn’t stick around. My current understanding of that experience is that I was totally unprepared to really think about ideas I was unfamiliar with and I lacked the attention span for deeper thought. I’m at the very beginning of the journey to develop these skills.
I’m interested and curious about too many things. Or rather, my curiosity tends to be mostly “on the surface”, without going deep into the subject. I believe a lot of the effect comes from the ADHD. I got diagnosed in the last 6 months and thanks to medication I’m finally experiencing that it’s actually possible to dive deep into challenging subjects/ideas. Getting diagnosed as a adult made me experience a sense of loss—all these years that I’ve been struggling and fighting with myself could be spent more productively! Of course it’s not that simple and ADHD has its pros, for sure. But after a while I can tell that medication for me is like a enabling technology, it opens up new possibilities. One of those is finally being able to engage more deeply with the ideas here on LW.