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- Alexandr Wang on why Paul Graham’s “Schlep Blindness” essay was seminal for Scale AI
Alexandr Wang on why Paul Graham’s “Schlep Blindness” essay was seminal for Scale AI
“One of the secrets to Scale AI — and I think this applies to almost every industry — was that the problem we were solving of building really high quality data sets was something that most machine learning teams knew was very important but it wasn’t necessarily the sexiest problem that every AI scientist wanted to spend their days and nights working on.”
Alexandr continues:
“There was one article that was pretty seminal for me early on. It was an essay by Paul Graham called ‘Schlep Blindness.’ I’d encourage everyone to read it if you get a chance. But basically the idea was that most people avoid thinking about the really difficult, hairy, ugly, and annoying problems that exist in the world but they’re really important. He actually uses Stripe as one of the examples in his essay, but these problems are everywhere. The ugly, hairy problems that everyone knows are important but aren’t sexy to work on — if you can identify what those problems are, they generally make really exciting startup ideas.”
This was a lot of the original pitch for Scale:
“You know this is important but you probably aren’t the most excited to work on it.”
And then the early Scale team was super scrappy, which helped them earn the trust of their customers:
“They saw our product velocity and how fast we were moving. They thought to themselves, ‘Even if they don’t have the perfect product today, they’re going to get to a product that we’re going to be able to rely on really quickly.’”
Full video: Startup Grind “How AI is Transforming Global Industries (Startup Grind Global 2022)“ (Apr 2022)
Quote of the Day
The Difference Between Good and Great People
“The difference between, say, the worst taxicab driver and the best taxicab driver to get you across town in Manhattan might be 2-to-1. The best one will get you there in 15 minutes, the worst one will get you there in half an hour… But in the field that I’m in... the difference between a good software person and a great software person is probably 50-to-1 or 25-to-1. Huge dynamic range. Therefore I’ve found, not just in software but in almost everything I’ve done, it really pays to go after the best people in the world.”
People underestimate how much variation there is in ability, but in fields that require deep creativity, the difference between good and great is enormous. The best engineers don’t just write cleaner code or work faster. They think in entirely different ways, solving problems others often don’t even see.
This is why hiring matters so much. A company full of average engineers won’t just be slower; they’ll build the wrong things. The best people aren’t just more productive, they shift the trajectory of what’s possible. Steve Jobs understood this instinctively, and it’s the reason why small teams of exceptional people routinely outperform large teams of merely good ones.