You make some good points in here, but I don't think it's the full story.
From my perspective (first eng at Notion), I think what the sales pitch that really captures people's imagination is these situations where "the whole is equal to more than the sum of it's parts". That's what Engelbart and Kay really demonstrated with their work. It preys on the Gambler's fallacy too, just like AI: building something hoping for an unexpected outsized reward.
Where these inspirations start to fall flat is when you start focusing on solving an actual problem. Notion, for example, didn't really solve any specific problems in the beginning that didn't already have a solution available. Most people are interested in solving a problem so they can move on and never return to it. They don't bother to sharpen their axe if they only have one tree to chop down, so they just get the job done and move on.
But what about the one person who tirelessly sharpens their axe so they can chop down a tree in one swipe? What is actually motivating this person to spend all of this effort just to chop down a single tree? Maybe this isn't the perfect analogy, but my point is that many of these ideas start out more like an art project than a startup company. Because too much focus on solving a problem leads "good enough is the enemy of great".
Going from art project to actual product requires a lot more work that people tend to realize. And in my experience, that process tends to siphon away a lot of inspirational energy. At least, this has been my personal experience. Having left Notion almost 2 years ago, I've been finding it hard to motivate myself to build another sausage factory.
This sounds like the linked post: some people build the game engine, others build the game.
I think what happens is that people use a tool and they find a flaw, and they come up with an idea which will not have it. They build it, great! But then their tool also has flaws, due to things they didn't predict or trade offs - to make one part more elegant, maybe another part must suffer.
I feel often the most productive is to live with the flaws and do incremental improvements to reduce them. Creating a whole new tool is often futile - unless it's revolutionary, adopting won't be great, or won't boost your productivity that much to account for the time you sank building it.
From my perspective (first eng at Notion), I think what the sales pitch that really captures people's imagination is these situations where "the whole is equal to more than the sum of it's parts". That's what Engelbart and Kay really demonstrated with their work. It preys on the Gambler's fallacy too, just like AI: building something hoping for an unexpected outsized reward.
Where these inspirations start to fall flat is when you start focusing on solving an actual problem. Notion, for example, didn't really solve any specific problems in the beginning that didn't already have a solution available. Most people are interested in solving a problem so they can move on and never return to it. They don't bother to sharpen their axe if they only have one tree to chop down, so they just get the job done and move on.
But what about the one person who tirelessly sharpens their axe so they can chop down a tree in one swipe? What is actually motivating this person to spend all of this effort just to chop down a single tree? Maybe this isn't the perfect analogy, but my point is that many of these ideas start out more like an art project than a startup company. Because too much focus on solving a problem leads "good enough is the enemy of great".
Going from art project to actual product requires a lot more work that people tend to realize. And in my experience, that process tends to siphon away a lot of inspirational energy. At least, this has been my personal experience. Having left Notion almost 2 years ago, I've been finding it hard to motivate myself to build another sausage factory.