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Alexandr Wang on why Paul Graham’s “Schlep Blindness” essay was seminal for Scale AI “One of the secrets to Scale AI — and I think this applies to almost every industry — was that the problem we were solving of building really high quality data sets was something that most machine learning teams knew was very important but it wasn’t necessarily the sexiest problem that every AI scientist wanted to spend their days and nights working on.” Alexandr continues: “There was one article that was pretty seminal for me early on. It was an essay by Paul Graham called ‘Schlep Blindness.’ I’d encourage everyone to read it if you get a chance. But basically the idea was that most people avoid thinking about the really difficult, hairy, ugly, and annoying problems that exist in the world but they’re really important. He actually uses Stripe as one of the examples in his essay, but these problems are everywhere. The ugly, hairy problems that everyone knows are important but aren’t sexy to work on — if you can identify what those problems are, they generally make really exciting startup ideas.” This was a lot of the original pitch for Scale: “You know this is important but you probably aren’t the most excited to work on it.” And then the early Scale team was super scrappy, which helped them earn the trust of their customers: “They saw our product velocity and how fast we were moving. They thought to themselves, ‘Even if they don’t have the perfect product today, they’re going to get to a product that we’re going to be able to rely on really quickly.’” Source: @StartupGrind (Apr 2022)