When you have lots of traffic you can do percent experiments and climb the hill faster.

Do lots of experiments and then only follow the ones that work.

The broader the scale, the more you can do this.

You forget the experiments that didn't work, and the path that ends up working feels like the only one that could have worked.

The result is that looking backwards, there's a clear narrative.

But it emerged bottom up fundamentally!

Same as how ecosystems find breakthrough new startups.

It looks like top-down brilliance, and it is smart people working hard with good insights... but we over-narrativize it because it's easy to grasp.

That is necessary but not sufficient for any individual to succeed to start, it's also about being lucky.