Source: Projects and Companies – Sam Altman >
I love this essay. It’s crisp and juicy.
To me it captures well the mixture of a few different aspects of things we work on:
Passion
Seriousness vs. playfulness
Pure vs. complicated
Companies tend to be low passion, serious, and complicated. Projects tend to be high passion, playful, and pure.
So the lesson I get from the essay is to keep that mix for as long as you can, and only take on the extra baggage of the company when it’s absolutely necessary.
If you do it too quickly you’ll kill either the passion for, or the forward momentum of, the idea.