Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

What Zuck, Elon and Sam had in common early

28 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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A group of early-2000s nerds including Zuckerberg, Altman, Musk, and Hoffman shared one thing: they stuck with building internet companies when everyone else was going to law school. They kept reinventing themselves across technological eras without losing focus.

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In the early 2000s, you were basically hanging out with some of the biggest success stories of today. Folks like Zuck and Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, Elon, Sean Parker. This is before they really became anyone. I'm curious, looking back at that, what you've noticed is consistent across these folks.
It just felt like a bunch of nerds that really liked the internet and computers kind of doing things that they were interested in. What they had in common is the folks that are now the really big names just had a lot of staying power. They weren't like, geez, should I move to New York? Maybe I should go to law school. Like it was people that were very bought in to staying working on internet companies. And so you'll see these folks just reinvent themselves multiple eras, right? All these different eras where it's the same person, but it's almost like a different figure.