I’m inclined to agree. There is an underlying (mostly unquestioned) assumption that surely there must be something actionable to learn from the articulation of the history of other companies. But… maybe not? Just because we can clump a bunch of people and processes together to call it a “company” doesn’t make it the same (or even remotely similar) to any other company! Every company is unique at every point in time and space, and companies are made of people, who are also unique at every point in time and space.

Maybe the scary truth surely is that we are always on our own, and our longing for security and familiarity draws us to a sort of pareidolia - seeing patterns where there are probably none. Add to that a survivorship bias of a few people who succeeded and possibly assign causation to the correlation of having succeeded after following the previously mentioned articulations.

It’s late here! I’ll read this comment once again in the morning and see if it makes any sense or if the HN pitchforks are out for me ;)