The 20 year old Mark Zuckerberg could likely beat both of us combined in say, business. And would probably be successful no matter what. But would probably not be a billion dollar business, were circumstances even slightly different.

Lots of companies and individuals fail all the time, despite their skills.

You are unlikely to be a special snowflake. Even in the case that you are, it might be summer.

Naturally, people tend to emphasize only some of these factors, depending on their own experiences, current agenda, and what kind of story they need or want to tell at the time. Each of these stories is the truth, but not the whole truth.

[Is this fatalistic? I don't think so. Just because most factors aren't under your direct control, doesn't mean you can't be determined and keep trying. Also you could insert here some aphorism like, "it's the journey not the destination". If you're having any fun and even a modest amount of success, you're quite fortunate. You could do worse. Some billions of people probably are doing worse. You may as well be appreciative and thankful, while you keep pushing forward.]

This is an uneducated man who could barely write but managed to make a fortune through, luck, tenacity, delusions of grandeur, and a series of truly idiotic or brilliant decisions depending on how you look at it.

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Seneca

Scott Adams' book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" also touches on this, suggesting that skill + hard work don't automatically result in success (there certainly are factors beyond our control), but it's a lottery that you can keep playing over and over with no real inherent cost other than time. Especially in software, you can test a lot of ideas with very little financial risk/investment, and persistence often allows preparation and opportunity to meet. There are no guarantees of course, except the guarantee of failure without trying.

A lot also comes down to your definition of success. I'd say aim high, but expect very little. Expect the kind of return you'd get from a hypothetical full-spectrum new venture ETF. A handful of unicorn successes averaged with a huge tail of losses = returns that are probably really depressing. Be happy with anything above that.

I'm calling it. American dream's heart stopped beating. 04/09/2015. Dead.

You think folks back in the 1920s could live in the most expensive cities in the US, own a home, send their kids to college, all on one income. I don't think so.

Your seem to be saying people don't even want that any more.

If so, what's the problem?

  Nice house
  Raising kids (4)
  Single income
  American

EDIT: I guess HN doesn't support Unicode, my cute little checkmarks are getting eaten. Maybe the dream isn't real after all...

Yes, it's expensive, and it's getting harder as prices begin to reflect the dual-income status of a lot of middle class families, but it's not that difficult if you're willing to make some basic compromises. Consider that it's all relative. I think my life is pretty nice as-is, and that's what matters.

I would say that it's a lot easier if you don't live in SF or another city with an atrocious cost of living, but really in SF and NY you need a sextuple income to afford a liveable place, so the point is kind of moot anyway.

20 year old Mark Zuckerberg would keep adjusting until he was whatever a unicorn needs to be in this instant. That's his nature.

You would not.

That's the difference.

Most succeses had been a combination of being born at the right place and time, to the right parents, going to the right school and meeting the right people. Most of those are heavily determined by the past beyond one's control -- and others are semi-random.

Then there's talent for business and determination -- but it's only survivorship bias that doesn't let us see that lots of people who didn't get to have FB also had equal talent for business and determination, or even more than Mark.

Even a "perfect" Mark could have been hit by a bus before the success, or had a dehabilitating illness, etc -- and then your "magical unicorn" admiration would go to whoever else got to be succesful at the time, while Mark still be the same person (only unsuccesful).

We also have to acknowledge that you can still take two people who started in roughly the same circumstances and get dramatically different outcomes due to different drives to succeed. To say "most successes had been a combination of being born at the right place and time, etc." leaves out this part of it. I went to a top university and was incredibly privileged to be born both very intelligent and in the middle class to be able to get there. Yet, while all of my classmates are doing just fine in life, there's a huge difference between those that were passionate and hard working and those who weren't. There are tons of people I know who are very smart and came from privileged backgrounds, but who you knew would never do something big because they didn't have the fire inside to work 60-100 hrs/wk for 10 years straight or who valued the prestige and reduced risk of a big company more. Honestly, I don't entirely blame them as it's not always the most fun way to live. But some people are just driven as hell and while it's not enough to be that way without the luck of natural abilities and familial resources, you shouldn't leave it out of your list of factors for things that contribute to success because it makes a really big difference even if not necessarily sufficient by itself.

That's a caricature of the problem. You don't need to live in a bad neighborhood. You only need to live in a community where people don't talk about starting businesses, don't know how to start businesses, or never made friends with anybody who owned a successful business. No connections = low chance of success.

http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate

And you sound like a guy who likes ad-hominens (and still believes in self-help books).

>For one Bill Gates who worked hard to become who he is, there are tons of other people who were in similar or even better situations than him who didn't.

You forgot the tons of other people who worked as hard or more hard than Bill Gates, but didn't get anywhere. Which is the whole point of this thread.

Nobody said that Bill Gates didn't work hard. Just that working hard doesn't mean much as a means to be a billionaire for three reasons:

1) You can work the same or even 2x as hard, in the same business, and get nowhere. Or do you think that failed Microsoft competitors didn't work just as hard, or weren't smart enough?

2) It's many times easier for someone with the backhistory of Bill Gates (the family, the education given to him, being white etc) to be able to even try to do what he did, that for people with less fortunate back histories. And that has nothing to do with smarts or hard work. There are tons of hardworking smart blacks, latinos, LGBT, Nigerians, Sudanese, Venezuelans, etc. Just being white and middle class (or upper middle class even better) means you play life in "easy mode".

3) And obviously you can work 2x or 10x as hard and/or smart in another business, as a scientist, coal-miner, surgeon etc and never get nowhere near making millions, much less billions.

Of course you also overestimated how hard Bill Gates actually worked to get where he got -- because you thought backwards to support your belief: "oh, he is a billionaire therefore he must have worked much harder than people that aren't billionaires to get there".

Instead of making an empirical observation: lots of company owners, in startups etc, bleed sweat for their company, often working 16 hours a day, toiling for years etc, and then fail. And that others are often made millionaires for being in the right place at the right time (Google's first cook, for one).

Gates was smart and worked hard indeed, but there were lots of CS pioneers who worked harded and were much smarter, without billions to show for it.

In fact if Digital Research's boss haven't blown IBM lucrative DOS contract for totally BS reasons, Microsoft would probably have gotten nowhere fast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory

And since it's all about the determined individual, I also guess women, blacks, latinos, LGBT et al are just lazy or not competent enough as Mark, Gates et co to not have such many billion dollar success stories -- heck even way less million dollar success stories per percentage of the population. Right?

He was born with his star in ascendence, destined to rule over the unruly private lives of every human alive, destined to surround himself with empty mansions so no others may peek upon his divine unicornhood.

He is the first coming of social media ceo-frat-bro-jesus.

praise be unto the billionaires, for they know not what they do; they only do what they are destined to accomplish regardless of their parents sending them to $60,000 per year teenage boarding schools. do not believe you can know them, for they are not fellow humans, they are Greater while we shall always remain Lesser to their unicorn brilliance. Bow, and praise be.

Demonstrate then. "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor

So, the alternative hypothesis is no better if you want to go throwing around that sort of blame.

He wasn't some genius programmer. He created a glorified forum (and in PHP).

He wasn't some genius businessman (evident from his early interviews). He created something at the right time, that got momentum because of that, and that attracted the right people to help make it a success business wise.

Would he have gotten somewhere else if it wasn't for that? Maybe, maybe not.

I don't see anything particularly convincing that he wouldn't have regressed to the mean.

1) self driven

2) loves to build

3) doesn't let things get in their way

4) goals based on their version of the future

5) deep thinkers / intellects

6) holds their own values and priorities

7) evidence driven / scientific

8) conqueror's mindset

9) idea person, doer, dreamer, student, teacher all in one

10) never was about the money, and more about passion

I don't claim this list to be 100% accurate or exhaustive, but the point is there is more than just luck and DNA, and many of these traits are acquirable. The demographic to me says that the chances of becoming that person are higher under those circumstances, but the demographic itself does not directly enable or cause any such success. Just as all presidents were white until Obama, maybe we just need someone to shatter the stereotype.

Personally, what I respect most is their capacity to generate their own philosophies and to then apply them to their products, to their companies, and to their lives. I find people that can do this are successful at any level.

I mean is Mark "deep thinkers / intellects" etc in general? Or it's just a (average) smart college boy who wrote a service that hit the right spots and got viral?

I also know many millionaires (and billionaires) for whom it was always "about the money", and that was their passion.

Yes, many of the traits are shared with average people, as is the trait of being human. This to me only attests to how similar and ordinary and close we really are to those we love to put on high pedestals. How do ordinary people accomplish extra-ordinary feats? To this I suspect combination is key. You could be perfectly capable but not have a dream. You could be a dreamer but lack self motivation... and so on and so forth. And sure, maybe you had it all except for the money to fund yourself. But either way, if we are admitting there is a combination, we're already past the luck hypothesis.

What's so special about those people? Their success is probably due to their connections, and mostly luck in timing. I'm sure there are people that are better than Larry or Sergei and are much less successful.

It's not all luck, a lot of it is who they are. They are mostly aspie nerds. They all went to private montessori "we just do whatever we want" schools. Those schools teach them they don't have to compromise, they don't have to be average, they don't have to work within the system. They just do whatever they want. If someone tries to stop you, you destroy them for standing in the way of you doing whatever you wanted to do.

The same people generally lack overt, crippling hardships in their lives. They get to associate with other successful people from an early age and often have built-in family or community connections.

Musk was studying supercapacitors obsessively as a kid, as a teenager, as a 20-something, and now he puts them in his cars. It's not all luck.

We're at the first age of humanity where aspie hyper-focused weirdness can be funneled into taking over the world. We're just getting started.

Even with that, Zuckerberg isn't 100% focusing on the Facebook core product; look at the Connectivity Lab, for example.

EDIT - This comment is at -4. And it's 100% factually and clearly observably true and devoid of emotional content. Which says a lot about how voting works on this site.

They're fairly explicit about it.

And their track record is pretty positive about the concept.

People who believe that will is everything are generally pretty naive. Successful people know that if external conditions were even slightly different, their path wouldn't have turned out the way it did, and no one can guarantee it would've been as prosperous.

For example, I make an OK living as a software developer. My interest in computers started when my dad brought home a Packard-Bell in the early 90s. He bought it through a discount program that his workplace offered to increase computer ownership amongst their employees. If he had worked for a different company, or if his company had not made it affordable for him to buy a computer when they were still relatively uncommon in homes, it's very possible that I would be out there bagging groceries somewhere.

If MySpace had been a little wiser, there would've been no room for Facebook. Did the people at MySpace feel the sheer force of Zuckerberg's unicorn-desire and decide to just back off? I don't think so. He was in the right place (at least half-random) at the right time (80%-ish random) and had the right skillset (probably 10% random). There are many thousands of kids like him that didn't have "the stars align" when they had their shot. It doesn't mean Z. wanted it harder and it doesn't mean that these no-names didn't do a good job. The world is not a meritocracy.

Am I wrong about YC's central operating principle?

Are they not explicit about it?

Does their track record prove them wrong?

Since we're talking here about what you call 'unicorns' (I hate that word), then we're talking about the odds of building a billion-dollar company. YC is made up of hundreds of incredibly talented entrepreneurs, and even then, it's pretty evident that building a billion dollar company is as much about luck and circumstance as it is about talent and determination.

EDIT: Correction - I was very wrong about YC stats, as it turns out [1]. My mistake. I stand by the original point, though. 8 billion-dollar companies out of ~940 YC companies demonstrate clearly that building a billion dollar company isn't easy, and takes a whole lot of luck.

[1] http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-stats

50% of yc startups are still going.

http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-stats

Just because money changes hands in the end doesn't make it a success. You fail upwards until you become a creature of pure thought leadership (i.e. a VC whose only job is to 'have an opinion' on stuff and can never be proven wrong because, hey, it's all an opinion or luck or the market or some unforeseeable outside force you failed to consider when failures continually happen).

That's not the right question. It's whether the 20 yr old Mark Zuckerberg beats himself every time? What are his chances of doing it again.

In my life I've met a lot of people that made it, but few that made it multiple times. The ones that made it all had a lot going for them and many were brilliant. A lot of them were in the right place at the right time, and had a lot of luck along the way. Very few of them (1 that I know for sure) was a serially successful. Henry Burkhardt III. Problem is, he was not an ethical person and was sued by the SEC for fraud[1].

Let's also be honest: on the path to being insanely wealthy there are a lot of forks in the road. One fork is treating people "right" (think golden rule here) and the other is being completely selfish and screwing people over. In my career, I've been at that road many times. I always chose the sleep-at-night path. There are some serially successful people that always take the "get mine" path. I've known a few of those people, too.

So, luck and the willingness to screw people over. Those are two ingredients for success.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr14895.txt

The older I get and the more I witness people doing business, the more I have come to the same conclusion. I would possibly broaden "willingness to screw people over" to something like "the capacity to be able to overlook or be oblivious to any negative effects of one's path to success on the other people on the planet."

I know it's a little weak to reference a fictional TV show, but the Silicon Valley investor who made it big with radio on the internet then spends the rest of his career flailing around with no idea what he's doing is more real than the mystical Great Man Unicorn.

Elon Musk has succeeded at everything he has touched, and some of those things were deemed impossible before he did them. As a society, we should be throwing money and projects at Elon until he fails for the first time in his life.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

No, he doesn't. FB's success due to 20+ random meetings, connections etc he had. And of course that there wasn't already a capable competitor in that space.

And the non-random facts of his rise, you can't control anyway (being born to rich parents, going to an Ivy League school, etc).

The idea that we as individuals are somehow "special" and odds don't matter is a fallacy.

  > The theory was popularized in the 1840s by Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle.
  > But in 1860 Herbert Spencer formulated a counter-argument that has remained
  > influential throughout the 20th century to the present; Spencer said that
  > such great men are the products of their societies, and that their actions
  > would be impossible without the social conditions built before their
  > lifetimes.

(And if we don't care enough to do the work, then we can always not do it and just skip the comment with the link).

It serves no purpose, because the purpose itself was never mentioned. I asked for one. I don't quite understand why it bothered you.

>I don't quite understand why it bothered you.

Because of the entitlement ("YOU have to do the work" etc) and the pissing on his contribution ("what's the point of linking to such articles" etc).

That being said, how could the fact that "Great Men" have been raised in stagnating societies be explained?

If you were raised in a societie's whose culture embraces mediocrity, you have to think for yourself and let that fact not define your actions.

Meetings absolutely will create a billion dollar company.

And EVEN if you HAD built a billion dollar company yourself, that wouldn't say much.

First, because the way you did it wouldn't necessarily be representative of how it generally happens.

Second, because you could be attributing all your success in doing it to your self, hard work etc, overlooking all the random and lucky elements (not to mention other people's work) that helped you to achieve that. That's a very common psychological fallacy ("no winner believes in luck"), and one can have it even for minor achievemnets.

So let's stick to observation on how many of those companies were made (as non-billion dollar company creators ), and arguments that appeal to logic, law, how society works, etc.

This is what the person said.

>>Meetings absolutely will create a billion dollar company.

I questioned this absurd statement.

>Second, because you could be attributing all your success in doing it to your self, hard work etc, overlooking all the random and lucky elements (not to mention other people's work) that helped you to achieve that. That's a very common psychological fallacy ("no winner believes in luck"), and one can have it even for minor achievemnets.

That is your own projection, and actually shows flaws in your own thinking. I have never claimed this to be true. Also, since you're so interested in fallacies, you should be able to spot your own.

>So let's stick to observation on how many of those companies were made (as non-billion dollar company creators ), and arguments that appeal to logic, law, how society works, etc.

You are a severely confused person. Some humans, in some domains, some of the time, apply logical thought, and that sometimes produces results. You want a logical argument? Humans are not robots and they do not interact with the world simply using logic and no law describes how society works. Logic means nothing in the domain we're discussing. How a billion dollar company is made, is not some provable hypothesis.

What “absurd statement”?

Famously Bill Gates got lucky because Digital Research blew a meeting with IBM to licence their DOS.

Or consider YC Combinator: a successful meeting with PG/YC staff can mean further investor interest in your company and play a pivotal role in its success.

That doesn’t OBVIOUSLY mean that you don’t have to deliver anything or that you don’t need to work.

Just that a company who works as hard as you and has a product just as compelling but blew their meeting (because the founder had a flu, or is not a good talker, or got nervous, or something died during the demo etc) might go nowhere.

Meetings (not brainstorming meetings or discussions between your developers), meetings with people, partners, businesses, VCs are crucial to the success of a company.

>That is your own projection, and actually shows flaws in your own thinking. I have never claimed this to be true. Also, since you’re so interested in fallacies, you should be able to spot your own.

It’s a generic argument on a well known human behaviour — people attributing their success to “hard work” and forgetting things in their favour that others lack and/or their lucky breaks.

What “flaws in [my] own thinking” does that observation show, and what is the BS about "projection", as if we were in kindergarten ("back at you").

>I have never claimed this to be true.

And I never claimed that YOU claimed this to be true.

I didn’t write “you believe blah and blah”, but “it wouldn’t matter if you had made a billion dollar company, because even if you would, you could e.g. be an outlier in regards to how these companies are made, or you could misattribute your success to hard work as many do”.

It was a generic argument about why whether one has started a billion dollar company or not is not really important in this discussion.

Why? To repeat my argument: first because it’s a very limited experience of one personal story (so there’s no guarantee it’s representative for other billion dollar company makers) and second because it’s about them, so its highly probable that they won’t be objective (and it’s actually a common human trait not to be in cases of success, one studied by psychology).

>You are a severely confused person.

Again with the ad-hominens.

>You want a logical argument? Humans are not robots and they do not interact with the world simply using logic and no law describes how society works. Logic means nothing in the domain we’re discussing. How a billion dollar company is made, is not some provable hypothesis.

You say that, but you seem unable to take clues from context about what we’re discussing. I’m OBVIOUSLY not talking about using logic like robots or computers (or scholastic philosophers).

It was another counter-argument aimed at your sneering remarks that the other guy who commented haven’t built a “billion dollar company”, so what does he know...

And I meant, obviously, that we should discuss with logical arguments (avoid logical fallacies), looking at the role of the legal system (law), at how how society works, and observe how those companies were created, to understand their success.

Didn’t reading “let’s stick to observation on how many of those companies were made” [and] “how society works” make you see that I wasn’t referring to logic in the robotic sense (or Principia Mathematica) but in the sense of “let’s not have BS illogical arguments”?

YOU said that all their success was due to some random meetings. If you don't mean what you say, then stop saying those things. Creating any successful business requires immense mental and physical resources. MZ is a genius (even though I personally dislike his personality-type) and FB is a result of him being awesome at what he does. You're trying to paint this picture that people have the raw ingredients within them to be a success, and all you need is to be in this right situation to take advantage of them. That kind of model is incongruent with reality.

> first because it’s a very limited experience of one personal story (so there’s no guarantee it’s representative for other billion dollar company makers) and second because it’s about them, so its highly probable that they won’t be objective (and it’s actually a common human trait not to be in cases of success, one studied by psychology).

'representative' doesn't mean anything because there are countless factors involved in being successful, and it is impossible to isolate them all. So let me ask you, why do you focus on success guarantees and objective success models? These things do not exist in the real world. There is simply no point in trying to establish ANY kind of logical reasoning behind success because it doesn't work that way. People look at what successful people do and they think "Hey it worked for X let me try and see if it might work for me". That is a perfectly normal way to approach these things - Which is the point the parent poster was making - "Business isn't exactly chess, but it's a lot closer to hold'em than it is to a lottery."

A gentle reminder of the rules is ok. It's also good to flag egregious comments. (To do that, click on a comment's timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag'.) We monitor those flags.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Most of us slip up from time to time and we all read things on HN that unduly provoke us, but it's critical not to channel that into rudeness on the site.

> I was responding to rudeness in kind.

Maybe so. But most everyone feels that way, so it's not an ok reason to break the rules.

It's obviously not saying that he had random meetings in their content and in who was present and that these somehow created his billion dollar company.

Just that the meetings he did have (the "right" meetings with the "right" people) were made possible due to lots of chances and random stuff happening first.

First random factor: if he was born in Alabama from a poor family instead of upper middle class NY family, his chances of having those meetings would be less than half. I'll let you calculate the changes for that happening if he was born black in Nigeria.

Okay then, lets get to specifics. Which meetings are those? Whom did he meet with? What makes you think they were with the "right" people? Who are the "wrong" people to meet with? Also, What makes you think that the meetings were only possible due to chance and would not have happened otherwise?

>if he was born in Alabama from a poor family instead of upper middle class NY family, his chances of having those meetings would be less than half.

How have you calculated the chances? Could you elaborate?

>I'll let you calculate the changes for that happening if he was born black in Nigeria.

I'll gladly do the work if you show me how YOU calculated it in the previous case.

Listen, I'm OK with general arguments and using rhetoric to drive a point. But understand that, your argument consists entirely of your own personal opinion, and people do not have to agree with you on anything. In fact, you then cannot tell someone that their opinion is wrong, if they disagree with you.

Just divide all billionaires or multi-millionaires you know by region and family background.

>I'll gladly do the work if you show me how YOU calculated it in the previous case.

I checked the top 100 richest people, and saw that people born in western countries are overrepresented -- especially US who is mere 4% of the global population but has almost all spots in the Top 20 (and further down).

Either those billions Asians and Africans are lazy sods, or external reality plays greater role that the "great determined unicorn" man...

And even in the US, those blacks, latinos, LBGT must be really lazy and incompetent, because they hardly make a dent in the top 100 most richer, despite the demographics (which show they are a huge percentage of the US population).

There are a ton more to keep going on.

I'm not saying the first versions of Facebook were ingenious feats of engineering, but Mark easily may have never learned to build things. Considering everything else mentioned in this thread, we can reasonably conclude that a lot of went very right for him at many points along the way.

2. Being white

3. Being cis

4. Being straight

5. Being born in the US

If that's your attitude, then yes he would.

But Facebook being the success it is was not due some genius insight on his part that was destined for greatness, it was mostly luck. If MySpace hadn't driven itself into the ground, Facebook would have never taken off.

If Google hadn't been so slow to realize the importance of social media, if Google+ hadn't been so bad, etc. There are any number of factors that are 100% outside of Mark Zuckerberg's ability to influence that could have stymied Facebook.

A good idea, hard work, good decision making, etc. all are necessary, but they are not enough. People who are hugely successful, and people who think they will one day be that successful like to believe that it's merit that got them there. But it's not. There's just as many talented people who don't make it. The filter is largely luck.

Survivorship bias always applies and it is the normal way.

25 year old Page beats you because he invents PageRank while studying the graph structure of the web as a PhD student at Stanford. That's a much better example of intellectual horsepower/execution rather than luck playing a pivotal role in making a successful business.

Why are you so sure about that? Has anybody ever observed all the Mark Zuckerbergs that didn't make it? This situation is a classic hindsight bias problem.

Even with having the same metrics for the YC entrants, they still get more than a 50% failure rate.

It's mostly random.

What basis do you have for saying this? If Mark missed out on the social media boom, what are the odds that he would find another industry waiting for a multibillion dollar company to come along?

There were many other social networks starting when fb did. They did not build and iterate at the same speed.

But like both of those comparators it is certainly a gamble.