Math Leaders Win
Take a look around you. Everything in the universe, manmade or otherwise, is built on mathematics.
Did you know Einstein needed help with math to make his ideas work, especially general relativity? He turned to mathematician Marcel Grossmann for help with the advanced geometry used to describe curved spacetime.
That’s how rare it is to be good at math. A math guy helped Einstein develop general relativity.
Almost no major tech founders and leaders have mathematics degrees. Not Gates. Not Bezos. Not Jobs. Not Zuck. Not Elon. Altman at OpenAI doesn’t have one, nor Amodei at Anthropic.
You know who does have a math degree? Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. He seemed to do ok building ML models for programmatic ads over the internet. Reed Hastings at Netflix has one. And a couple co-founders at Anthropic (Jared Kaplan) and OpenAI (Ilya Sutskever) have one.
Notice that there are no women in this list? We need to do something about that. Did you know the University of Iowa was the first public university in America to admit women and men on an equal basis?
Mathematicians are physicists and engineers. But physicists and engineers are not mathematicians. Elon is famous for celebrating hard-core engineering. What’s more hardcore than math?
Math represents the fundamental substrate of reality. And if you can crack math, you can crack everything else that’s built on it. Name the discipline, it’s yours for the taking. Tech is just the one where more of the money is made.
That’s how hard it is.
I began studying advanced mathematics at 13 years old. I was already a year younger than my classmates. A year less developed, and at that age, it matters. In high school, I was taking night and weekend college classes. I didn’t tell anyone. I was a four-sport athlete and was voted the class clown because, well, school was easy and I needed a different game to play.
I chose to study mathematics and actuarial science at the University of Iowa for its strength and renown. Actuaries were heavily recruited by Big 4 accounting firms and major Insurance firms (Berkshire Hathaway owes its success to insurance float). It led to my first F500 internship at 19, which catapulted me into my first F500 Board room later that same year.
You hear about Ivy League schools being the best. But the Ivy League doesn’t have a monopoly on mathematical talent. Iowa has a distinguished actuarial science, mathematics, and computing tradition. Let’s not forget Iowa was the birthplace of the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, a pioneering electronic digital computer. It certainly wasn’t invented at Stanford or by some fruit company in California.
Lower-skilled people are often bad at choosing highly-skilled people.
When you hear tech people talk about “let’s reason from base principles”, ask if they have a math degree. If they really cared about reasoning from base principles, they would have prioritized studying theoretical mathematics. Otherwise, they're a show pony.
So why am I telling you all this? Ego? Arrogance? Product Marketing? Grandstanding? Aspirations of world domination?
Hardly. It’s to prove a point and, once again, wake you from your slumber.
Look around your company’s ownership group, your investment committee, your board of directors, and your executive team. How many have mathematics degrees?
My guess is zero.
Which means, by definition, they don’t have the best judgement to select the best people for the job.
How could they? They never studied the foundations of reality. So they’re left guessing at reality (and not very well, I might add), hiring cronies from grad school (Ivy League rowing, anyone?) or people who worked at some company that used to be hot once (remember Groupon, Uber, how about Facebook)?
And of course, none of them have the same performance as Anthropic or OpenAI, two of the fastest-growing technology companies in history.
Many have blind spots, cutting them off from the self-awareness to recognize talent, or not be threatened by it.
I’ve met plenty of empty suits in my day. All that hot air? Not driving value creation or risk-adjusted returns. Rather, it's filling up an empty balloon that’s about to pop.
Worried about a bubble? It’s because you put bubble people in charge.
Know who suffers from empty suits? The people do.
The People are led by leaders who don’t get it. They have weak core values, weak intelligence, and weak athletic ability. They’re insecure, and it manifests in abysmal corporate cultures and mediocre business performance. They’re quick to point fingers, but slow to look in the mirror.
So, you wonder why interest rates are going up again? You wonder why prices at the grocery store are insane ($30 for two cups of soup??). You wonder why gas prices are so high ($6? I thought that was diesel). You wonder why the American Dream isn’t dreaming. You wonder why you can’t afford to buy a home. You wonder why your 401(k) hasn’t seen that promised 8%. You wonder why you’re worried about having kids.
It’s because you keep hiring and electing the junior varsity team who can barely spell mathematics, let alone use it to design better planetary-scale systems.
At this point, the only question remaining is what you’re going to do about it.
Stay on the same path with the same people and get the same results?
Or wake up and make a change.
Time for the math folks with strong core values to take control and leave these nincompoops in the dust.
—Sean
P.S. There are a few equally rare individuals who can recognize world-class talent, even in raw form, and open a door for them. They provide an on-ramp and help talent get their start or keep going through the wilderness. These door openers are arguably the most important people on the planet. There are a few who have helped me along my way, whom I will never forget, and be eternally grateful for. Be like these people: open a door.