Here’s more on ‘scenius’ – this time from Eric Schmidt:
The world is much smaller than it seems. If you’re an outsider looking at our world [the world of tech], somehow you think it’s this vast world, but to me it seems like about a hundred people, and they all know each other, they’ve all been on each other’s boards, they were all working towards a common goal.
I’ve since learned that this is how industries develop. So when you go back to the starting of the automobile industry or the starting of any other industry, it was a small community and everyone benefited by working together even if they were competing.
As an aside, when I first came to Google, I developed a habit of calling Terry Semel, who was the then CEO of Yahoo! who was our primary competitor, to congratulate him for every deal he got. And he developed the habit of calling me to congratulate me for my getting every deal. And the reason, aside from being a good person, which he was, was that we knew that if he got a customer to buy their product, we would shortly follow into that account. And he knew that if we got a customer using this, he knew that he would shortly follow into the account.
So there’s a real camaraderie around the building of these new network platforms … and they’re a relatively small group for much of their time.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google – The Tim Ferriss Show Ep. #367