Wow. He must have been the worst startup employee ever. 13 half finished projects? At a startup this is worth exactly nothing.

Finishing half of the "login module" is worth about nothing.

Finishing half of "google" is worth about eighty billion dollars.

Yahoo and Altavista finished about 90% of Google, a couple years earlier.

I guess. but would doing half the work for google be even close to half as good?

> This is clearly how the real big-shots "get things done".

And then he cites a movie as evidence? I think he's seriously confused about how great stuff is usually completed. I think most big-shots that you'd want to emulate do the immersion thing.

This reminds me of working with tenured research faculty. You start out immersing for two weeks, have a 20 minute conversation, then two more weeks end loop. This process repeats itself until you've certified yourself a genius or dropped out (in finance that usually means to a consulting or worse a teaching gig) at which point other people immerse themselves thinking about your 20 minutes of wisdom.

Ed Prescott (Nobel in econ) had an office down the hall from me, and he was famous for saying things like "aggregate balance sheets matter" and much smarter people than I would spend a week trying to parse just what he meant.

I wonder if any smart people have ever tried to see how long they can get away with being meaninglessly oracular.