Phil Libin: Surround Yourself with Smarter People

When I got my. After college, I got a job and I was working with a few friends of mine in Boston as a software engineer. So I'm a programmer by training. And I got a job at a company in Boston called atg, our technology group. That's what it was called at the time. I think it's since been bought by Oracle a couple of years ago. And ATG was this amazing company. I joined them right before they IPO'd. And we built. We just built all this awesome technology. We invented a lot of the stuff that you just sort of take for granted on the Internet, like dynamic web pages and stuff like that. This was in the late 90s, and I had this phenomenal experience at ATG, which is for up to now, at every point in my life, I was sort of used to feeling like I was the smartest person in the room. Totally not justified, obviously, but that was the feeling I had, right? I was kind of the snotty, nerdish kid. And I always felt that I was always the smartest person in the room pretty much all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Sure, the other kids had girlfriends and were good at sports, but I always got the sense that I was the smartest person. And at atg, that was the first time where that was patently not true, where even somebody like me could look around and be like, man, I suck. I am below average here. This is a brilliant group of people, a brilliant group of developers and engineers, and they are getting stuff done in an amazing way. And I am like, I am in awe of. Of this team. And I, frankly, was below average. I kind of got the feeling that they were putting up with me because I was like, I was just worth it to put up with. But I certainly wasn't one of the star developers, one of the star programmers. There were other people were. And I had this. When I first realized this, first it really troubled me greatly, but then I realized, this is awesome. This is the first time I'm ever really enjoying myself. This is the first time where I felt like the environment that I was in, that I lucked into by joining this company. And it wasn't the first company I worked at, right. I'd worked at tons of places where I did feel like I was the smartest person in the room, but in this environment where I clearly wasn't, where there was everyone around me or almost everyone was much smarter than I was, was the first time that I was actually happy and comfortable and not stressed out and not thinking about the end of the world for some strange reason. And I thought, this is great. This is how I'm going to structure my life. I want to structure my life so that I'm never the smartest person in the room. I want to go to other rooms, I want to make friends. I want to create a bubble around me where everyone else is just so much better, smarter, more productive, more capable, because that's how stuff actually happens. And that's how I get to feel good about things, and that's how I learn things. And learning is actually really fun when you're learning things that you care about. And I kind of resolved to actually structure my life that way. And that meant not working in places that were going to be stupid, not doing things that I didn't have any respect for, not associating with people when I could avoid it, that I feltly thought weren't going to add to this, but actively cultivating friends and relationships and work environments where I felt almost everyone else was smarter than I am. And I've managed to hold onto that up until now. That's been one of the fundamental things that I've done that I think has worked really well. In fact, that's clearly the case here. Just me being in this room, I think, is an example of that. I couldn't get into Stanford. By definition, you guys are all smarter than I am. This is me. And if being here is very much part and parcel of that lifetime experiment of trying to surround myself with the most interesting, the best possible people and then just kind of seeing what happens.