What do you want? A cut and paste ready business plan that will make you a billionaire?
Of course there is plenty here that is repeatable: Keep your eyes open for opportunities, when you spot one work really hard at it and do not give up until you have exhausted every option. These ingredients are also present in just about every other success story.
The fact that you do not see anything of value here is the heart of the problem, you could ask any entrepreneur out there that was ever moderately or more than moderately successful what made it work for them and you are likely going to hear a mix of very few elements:
- a good idea
- some luck
- good old elbow grease
- perseverance
- connections
You may have to weigh them differently on a case-by-case basis but that is a pretty good starting point.
Most people don't win the lottery, so don't ever expect this to happen to you, no matter how hard you try. Again, my interpretation, not opinion.
- safety net in the form of a wealthy family
- business model based on rent-seeking
When I got my first "real" job, I wondered how my coworkers, making less than me, were justifying their BMWs and Lexuses. Then I found out that they aren't dumb, they just have 10 million dollar trust funds and having a job is a pre-condition their grandparents set.
https://www.livemint.com/Companies/7CN7u5d4i3bfYgBAZLdLpM/Wi...
Also in very many failure stories—far more than the number of success stories.
They don't see all the smoke and mirrors associated with "success" now days.
That quote for instance, is a nice way of spinning the fact that he had to get a job cleaning hotel rooms
There's approximately 50,000 children mining minerals in unsafe underground conditions instead of going to school. If you want a harder problem to solve than making 5M, then solve that.
I saw three things I didn't know, off the top of my head:
1) India/China have a demand for budget travel that's clean because apparently there wasn't enough supply? 2) There is still apparently global demand because they're expanding. So, you could go copy what they're doing somewhere else. 3) His success started with a booking app?
As for the title, sure, but it's just a copy of the article title which is pretty SOP on HN.
He found a niche in the market with demand that lacked supply and filled the gap. Go find a niche.
Consider someone who plays a lot of fighting games professionally. They might start off with a 20-30% WR, but as they become more skilled they might reach 40, 50, 60% and so forth. If you lose a match the only thing you're out of is a little bit of time.
To draw a comparison to startups: What is the percent of startups that are successful? 5%? 10%? If we consider how much money and time you might lose by investing into a startup I would argue that many people may only get one or two shots at it. However if you manage to be moderately successful with your first shot, you have a lot more wriggle room to grow as an entrepreneur.
The heart of what I'm getting at is that I really think luck and timing is how people first find success. Which while it's nice to believe that anyone could make a successful startup the cost of failure is immense. Survivorship bias means we only see the people that are successful, especially because their successes beget more successes and more publicity. Someone earlier brought up the counterpoint that 'there are entrepreneurs that have had multiple successes therefore luck can't be involved' and my only thought was that 'maybe those early successes or safety nets allows for the dampening of bad luck'.
Try this http://autopsy.io/
Factually correct, but hardly a recipe for success for the 99% of population.
This is pretty unlikely, given the current US population of ~350,000,000.
There are ten people worth $50 billion or more. It's a close enough estimate to say that the Gates / Zuckerberg type outcome is one in a billion.
There are ~44 people worth $20 billion or more (one in 168 million people). 22 of those people come from the US (one in 15 million). Almost no matter how you cut it, these types of outcomes are extraordinarily rare.
This strongly suggests that those 22 people got their wealth more from their location in the US (eleven times the world rate!) than their personal qualities. (More accurately, that without the wealth attributable purely to being located in the US, 20 of those people would not have crossed the $20 billion threshold. But since I see at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth that the 15th richest person in the US has more than $38 billion, the wealth attributable to location would in fact appear to be the majority of the wealth.)
On the pretty reasonable assumption that this also applies to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, their correct comparison pool would be the US population, and they are not at the one in a billion level.
On a more fundamental level, we can easily calculate the odds of 350,000,000 people having a certain number of 1e-9 people among them. As I make it, the odds of 0 one-in-a-billion individuals in a population of 350,000,000 are 70.47% (0.999999999^350000000). The odds of exactly one such individual are 24.66% (0.999999999^349999999 × 0.000000001 × 350000000). So from first principles the odds of a population the size of the US having two or more one-in-a-billion individuals along any given dimension are less than 5%. (And a third one, like Jeff Bezos, would eat up another 4.32% of the probability space.)
It's not realistic to call these people "literally one in a billion". They aren't.
How is writing an article unfair? How exactly does it rob anyone of anything? What possible reality check is given by not having this article?
Every single business is unique and everyone's situation is different. There's no shortcut other than just doing it, and there's always plenty to learn from every story, including this one. Failure is part of the game, and I'd much rather have people be inspired to attempt it, and have a few succeed, than nobody try at all.
The vast majority is hard work on executing a plan, so that you're even in the correct place to take advantage of a lucky opportunity that comes along. Even the lottery requires you to actually buy a ticket at some point. Luck is a part of everyone's lives, but nothing happens without action.
And how do you know what's a wise course for anyone else? There are stories of success and failures everywhere. Learn from them all, and do what you want.
I didn’t say that, and that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about s 24 year old and a $5 billion dollar business. That would make his company one of 227 active unicorns in the world, which frankly makes the lottery comparison incredibly apt.
Winning an Olympic gold medal is similarly difficult but I'm sure you wouldn't say that it's just a lottery and not worth writing about.
Even putting aside the degree to which a gold medal relies on recognition of both measuresble inborn talent and acquired expertise, it’s not very similar. We’re not talking about success being difficult to achieve, so much as a certain scale and type of success being impossible to predict, possessing exceedingly low odds, and being largely random within the pool of “people trying.” If we”re being honest that describes lotteries and this story, and not Olympic gold.
If you think it's pure luck, then that means building (this) business is no different than winning the lottery - which you specifically said wasn't the comparison before.
If it's not all luck, then that means success takes difficult work and odds only further show the challenge in getting to this scale, in which case it's perfectly fine to write about.
So which is it?
"a certain scale and type of success being impossible to predict, possessing exceedingly low odds, and being largely random within the pool of “people trying.”"
Ok...? This isn't relevant, it just shows thats its difficult to get there (with some luck required).
Luck is huge factor in starting a company and making it click but that's universal and nothing unique in this case. It was the case with Gates and Jobs and Ambani but luck was not everything in their cases and neither it is here.
This is a key driver of innovation and allows the startup method to spread. You're right that desperate people need a reality check, but competent, ambitious people also need a roadmap.
The survival rate of startups is very low. Only a tiny fraction go on to be successful, and an even smaller portion go on to be unicorns.
Not all startups are tech startups, and not all startups are necessarily worth the opportunity cost.
The people who made a killing were investors. I think That’s where the risk reward math makes more sense, from a purely monetary perspective of course.
You cannot lose the lottery on purpose, but I’m sure this guy could have failed on purpose.
Sure, luck is involved, but the existence of several successful serial entrepreneurs is a heavy counterpoint.
therefore, roulette is based on skill
luck may be involved, but the existence of several successful roulette players is a heavy counterpoint
- They are solving problem differently
- 24 year old scaled a company to $5 billion value
And of course you can downvote.
There are plenty of budget hotel chains in India (Treebo, Ginger, Lemon Tree, Fab, etc), some of which have been around for 15+ years, so obviously Oyo has done something right to leapfrog all of them.
So like thousands of businesses do?
>- 24 year old scaled a company to $5 billion value
And that makes it useful because? It shows that another few out of billions of 20-something might also be able to do it? We already knew that from Zuckerberg.