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.
50% of yc startups are still going.
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).
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.