Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business
by cookiecaper on Friday September 04, 2015 @12:16PM
(#10171365)
They were all dependent on luck and outside circumstances. Without Bill's mother's connections that got him in the door at IBM, Microsoft may've never been anything more than a blip. Without the gross indifference to search pre-Google (Y! focused on being a "web portal", not search results), Page/Brin may've just been starving grad students that eventually found a semi-OK job in academia. Most blatantly, if Jobs didn't have a passive engineer like Woz to co-opt, he would've been just another self-centered burnout.
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.