A Word to the Resourceful
Applies to employees as well.  One of the better things about Google is that with <i>most</i> engineers, you can raise some concern or some alternative way of doing things, and they'll just get it, understand all the implications, and be able to implement it with no further direction.  (The ones that can't are pretty infuriating to work with, because it takes you longer to hand-hold than it would to just do it yourself.)  I had an intern last fall where I could just give him the name of a product or technology to look into, or a contact e-mail for the team in charge, and he'd go look into it and come up with a working implementation.  He's just been given an offer, so with any luck he'll be a coworker next year.<p>The thing is - I'm not certain this is entirely a property of the person involved.  Yes, there are certain skills that make it easier to find information on your own.  But this is also a function of the problem domain and how well you know it.  If you give me a credit card and a problem statement, chances are that I can come up with a working webapp that solves the problem.  But if you give me the name of a VC and tell me to go raise money - where do I start?  How do I approach him?  What will burn bridges and what won't?<p>So my question to PG and any other resourceful folks out there is: how do you approach a problem domain in which you know <i>nothing</i>, and manage to gain enough of a map of the territory so that you listen to someone's one-word suggestions and instantly grasp the implications?