From a recent discussion, my comment:

From a recent discussion, my comment:

There’s this kind of crap in the industry, probably dating back to the time of the first IPOs. It’s called “genius syndrome.” Or I also call it “iron man perception.”
VCs like Thiel and others pulled off a few genuinely very successful deals, and often those were companies run by geniuses—movie-type geniuses, you know, borderline insane and at the same time they actually made it. Mark, for example. And so the word spread so hard that even movies like Fincher’s The Social Network are just crawling with those images. And then it took off. In the Russian-speaking (and not only) segment, this “I know the recipe” mindset got cemented—what you need to do and how to be a badass CEO. You’ve gotta smash everything, talk bullshit, do whatever, because I’m raising money and I’m on top. Only this whole story doesn’t match the fact that all the Valley fairy tales were based on a very short time window, and then people went through drastic changes really fast and became very strong leaders (same Mark). And people like (I’ll omit the name here, but it fits a lot of folks) still live in a dreamworld of fairy tales about Alexander the Great and pretty quotes from TechCrunch.