I can't remember who said this, but I've always remembered it: 'Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.'
It's very easy to see why things won't work out, and you can always find reasons to talk yourself out of them (and sometimes it's the right call). It's much harder to see which ones could become big if they actually work and why.
I've always had deep admiration for folks who develop this intuition for the latter. You can quickly tell they're really good with this intuition; it's priceless, and they aren't even aware of it, but only very, very few people have it.
I still remember how many people were not bullish on the first version of GPT (GPT-1), or CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training), and eventually they worked...but there are countless stories around this.
It is very easy to be pessimistic and right.
Most ideas are bad. Most markets are too early, too small, too crowded, too hard. You can build an entire worldview around seeing the flaw first, and be rewarded for it over and over again
But the strange thing about startups is that the only outcomes that matter come from the places where someone was optimistic and right
I used to underestimate how much this matters. But there is a whole world of difference between reacting to the world as it is, and having enough understanding of the world as it is to still stay open to what it could become
Long optimism
