Speaking from multiple direct experiences, simply living in the future and building what you perceive as missing does not necessarily end well.
I have lived this multiple times and I have delivered working products (why one of them is in production at Amazon but deprecated because of internal politics). For there is an inescapable political/sales dimension to this that separates a good execution from a successful good execution.
I am beginning to give up on the latter. I would love to know how to close the gap here but I suspect I will retire before that happens. One only gets a finite number of shots to succeed and the magazine is close to empty in my case.
I'm going to disagree somewhat. I've seen too many people work inside FAANG and perceive what they're missing and then leave to build it for them and get acquihired back in a year or two after their departure.
This does not require blind faith. This requires a degree of empathy to the frustration that their staff is undergoing but for which they don't have the leadership to address, and I guess some faith that you can build it for them, but definitely not blind faith because the evidence is staring you in the face.
I'm kind of sick of living in the future personally. I wasted way too many years on that. YMMV.
I think the blind faith is less about whether they can guess what's needed and more about always portraying confidence and saying that you'll succeed. How seriously are you going to take a product when the CEO of it sounds hesitant or sounds like he's hedging his bets? If you know a lot about the field then the honesty might be refreshing, but if you don't know much about the field then it won't seem appealing.
I cannot see blind faith mentioned anywhere in these essays. I can also not see it mentioned anywhere that you should not spend any time questioning your idea in the initial stages.
It is likely that you misunderstood PG. He is merely saying that even with all the work, you won't always be right in picking an idea. However, this does not imply that you should put no work on it and start acting on blind faith. In fact I am pretty sure YC does not fund teams who haven't spent at least some time analyzing their idea.
The latter quote is about having a unique insight, not blindly charging into bad ideas. I can’t see any possible connection between the first quote and blind faith.
The latter quote is about bad ideas and good ideas being virtually indistinguishable in the early stages. The corollary is that to move forward towards execution, (blind) faith is required. This is also why YC invests in people and not in ideas -- pivots happen all the time.
