Innovation comes in two kinds: bottom-up or top-down.

Bottom-up

You start with tinkering, small hacks and serendipity.

Examples:

• Drugs like Insulin and Penicillin were discovered by coincidence.
• The Transformer architecture allegedly was discovered by throwing a bunch of "tricks" (eg. positional encodings) at Bahdanau's RNN minus the recurrence.
• ChatGPT, according to Sam Altman: “It took us four and half years to launch a product. [...] We were building a technology without any idea of who our customers were going to be or what they were going to use it for.”
• Paul Graham argues that great startup ideas often emerge from working on things that could be dismissed as toys.
• Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned challenges goal-first marching because it can block exploration.

Upside: real, often non-consensus, signals from the world.

Downside: most paths lead nowhere, you need lots of shots on goal; cultures that make experiments cheap help.

Top-down

You start with a vision about the future, then design product and tech to make that vision true.

Examples:

• Nation-scale mission programs like the U.S. Interstate Highway System or the Manhattan Project were centralized, single-objective efforts. A lot of this is now happening in China, eg., with power stations or water diversion.
• SpaceX's Vision: make life multiplanetary. Reusability, Starship, and even Falcon-era steps are milestones on a long-term Mars roadmap.
• Palantir "floundered for years, barely getting any real traction in the gov space, and doing the opposite of the ‘lean startup’ thing" (Source)
• Peter Thiel's Zero to One argues for plan-first founders: “You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1.”

The upside is clarity and alignment, it's easier to coordinate capital and GTM around a single thesis. The downside is rigidity. If the thesis is wrong, commitment amplifies the error, and course corrections get costlier the further you go.

Bottom-up experience gives you top-down vision

People who have strong top-down visions tend to have bottom-up scars. The cuts teach taste.

In research, folks who have tinkered a lot with ideas, eg., by breaking existing methods, formulate and frame better hypotheses because their intuitions tell them what matters.

In startups, someone who built a product and made even just $1,000 gained tacit knowledge about product and go-to-market. That's why investors love to invest in 2nd time founders.

Still, bottom-up can win on its own; chance and stubborn work often do.