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I think the key thing here is he's talking about "the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake".

In other words, if I were working on a new programming language (just as an example), and could go hire Anders Hejlsberg as a consultant, well, that -is- going to be a mega cheat code. The amount of experience he'd bring to bear to even a 30 minute call would be insane. He would save me months or even years in mistakes and bad directions, and lead me straight to the core of whatever I wanted to do.

That's the thing - he's not talking about hiring a generic "cake consultant". With that in mind, it'd be much easier to find those people - you'd know them by their achievements.



Just an aside, not arguing...

You don't necessarily need to hire someone like Anders to pick their brain.

A lot of people who are not huge in the zeitgeist (and also are not assholes) are surprisingly reachable.

Funnily enough, I've chatted with Anders about programming language design -- I got the impression he thought my ideas were terrible.

For a while, you could just email Noam Chomsky and he would respond.




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