Lars, in my experience the average person is convinced that building and running something like AMZ is utterly trivial, and that they could get easily do it if they just worked hard for a week or so.
There's a fundamental disconnect between people like me (and some others here) who see the kinds of people CAPABLE of creating billion-dollar enterprises as fundamentally rare and unusual, and most people who seem to imagine that anyone can do it (which is much of the tone of Scott's second half argument).
I'm not sure how you resolve this, especially since people have extremely strong opinions about this based on essentially zero knowledge of anything relevant to the issue; what you are seeing is some sort of poll as to "beliefs regarding human nature", not any sort of reasoned, evidence based analysis of just how many potential billionaires are out there ready to create companies should one of the current giants fail.
For example in the case of AMZ, did they succeed because they were "so much better" or because of various nefarious nastiness like one-click patents? I'd say "so much better than the alternative", but it's hard to *prove* that (especially when you're arguing with a kid who wasn't even born when AMZ was founded, and has no clue how frustrating and incompetent retail was in the early 1990s...)
Lars, in my experience the average person is convinced that building and running something like AMZ is utterly trivial, and that they could get easily do it if they just worked hard for a week or so.
There's a fundamental disconnect between people like me (and some others here) who see the kinds of people CAPABLE of creating billion-dollar enterprises as fundamentally rare and unusual, and most people who seem to imagine that anyone can do it (which is much of the tone of Scott's second half argument).
I'm not sure how you resolve this, especially since people have extremely strong opinions about this based on essentially zero knowledge of anything relevant to the issue; what you are seeing is some sort of poll as to "beliefs regarding human nature", not any sort of reasoned, evidence based analysis of just how many potential billionaires are out there ready to create companies should one of the current giants fail.
For example in the case of AMZ, did they succeed because they were "so much better" or because of various nefarious nastiness like one-click patents? I'd say "so much better than the alternative", but it's hard to *prove* that (especially when you're arguing with a kid who wasn't even born when AMZ was founded, and has no clue how frustrating and incompetent retail was in the early 1990s...)