It's disingenuous to say, "…regardless of what affluence he had." The thing about being wealthy isn't that you don't have to work as hard to succeed at something (well, sometimes it is). The thing about being wealthy is that you don't have to do anything, so you have all this time to focus on what you want to do—and you can fail while doing it without any major consequences. Most people can't do that. Hell, half of the people in the US are scared to take a day off of work for fear of getting fired.

Yes. If you are wealthy (i.e. don’t depend on income) you can take big risks. 99% of the US couldn’t afford to spend $250k for a learning experience and a cute blog post.

To me that's almost the exact definition of wealth: not the amount of money that you have, but the fact that you have the freedom to do whatever you want to do - and fail hard at it - with no (or little) negative consequence. When people talk about "living the dream", that's what it means to me: not the life of the idle rich, but the freedom to try and fail - and hopefully succeed eventually - without ending up destitute or dependent on a salary to live (as most of us are).

99% of the world couldn’t afford to spend $25k

I don't think it's disingenous, becasue there are lots of different kinds of wealthy people. At the least, I meant to distinguish him from silver spoon types that simply purchase viewers/apps/influence and ride it out, or those that just fail and fail and fail in incredibly stupid ways, learn little and fall back on parents' money all the time. As far as I know, he is not that person.

In my mind what he's accomplished is doable by just living at your parents house (yes, that's also a bit of a luxury that others may not have), which is why I don't consider this to be simply a byproduct of wealth. With a bunch of drive and sheer will it could be done in nights and weekends. Is he entrepreneur of the year? maybe not, but he's certainly not richie rich who bought his way to the table -- while I have no idea what his resources are or what his interactions with whatever wealth source allowed him 250K @ 19, what he's done is not out of the realm of most office workers, especially in tech.

[EDIT]: He actually responded with how he got his start: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573002

Exactly, and this is a thing which would merit some work and attention from SV aspirational rich-sters. The damage done from scarcity is very real, and it's a profound handicap: it's not that effective to go temporarily insane and take on lots of risk without thinking of the consequences. You can't really artifically create the mental state of 'there aren't really consequences so I can focus my attention fully on this work without fear of disaster'.

So, logically, in order to maximize productivity output of entrepreneurs and new-thing-tryers, you must truly remove the consequences, perhaps with something like a universal basic income. Only then do you get to experience innovation as applied to an entire population, and only that will produce a broad enough population of experiments that you'll get a synergism and the invention of really new industries and scenarios.

Not rocket science, but maybe it'd lead to better rocket science :)

Step 1. Be super rich Step 2. Still be likable

:)