Gates' dad's a prominent lawyer and his mom was a prominent businesswoman on the board of directors on several different organizations. Not only did Gates learn programming as a kid, but Microsoft only got on IBM computers because his mom knew IBM executives.
When you come from privilege, it's much easier to have confidence that things will work out.
Not to undermine their success, but people tend to skip where their success come from, besides brightness. I mean, you can be as bright as possible, but of course if your parents are the first one investing on you (investing cash, I mean) then everything it's a lot easier.
This happens at various levels of course.
I recently had a conversation with an ex-colleague that had just left the company and was considering moving abroad. He said he had some money saved and I was shocked to hear how much he had saved. When I came back home, feeling quite miserable I must admit, I ran the numbers and understood the where the difference in his savings and mine came from: put simply, I had to move from another region of my nation to where I currently live and work, while he's just from here. The difference merely came from not being forced to pay a rent every month and on top of that, saving more money on others things he just didn't have to pay. There's nothing bad about that per se of course, I just felt a bit bitter because I understood that no matter how good or hard I work, that's a privilege gap I will probably never fill.
Privilege is something many people don't realise, and don't realise how big of an impact it makes.
"Just finished university, $100k to invest, what should I do?"
Wait, how does someone who just finished university have $100,000 in the bank? That's a milestone I proudly hit after several years in the workforce with a good job and living very frugally.
Of course, it's people whose parents paid 100% of their expenses (tuition and living) through university, so every penny they earned from internships, co-ops or scholarships went straight into the bank.
Now ask yourself how much easier it is to start a risky company when the first thing greeting you after finishing school is a 6-figure bank balance not $1000+/month of loan repayments.
Who applied themselves
For every entrepreneur that had a shortcut, there are 1,000s of trust fund kids that vegetate
Its not about your struggle, keep applying yourself
The society benefits
How many families with the Zuckerberg and Gates level of privilege produced nothing significant
This is something that I discovered myself recently. A year ago I quit my job and moved to Australia with practically zero savings. It was a risky move, but I knew that at the end of the day if it all went wrong and I couldn't find a job and ran out of money, I'd be able to just fly back home and stay at my parents' house while I sorted my life out.
Not everybody gets this privilege. A lot of my friends are estranged from their parents, or their parents couldn't afford to put a roof over their head while they sort their life out.
I can afford to take risks, knowing that I have a safety net. I'm not going to end up homeless if a business idea fails or I get made redundant.
I had a decidedly middle class upbringing, but with that I had a lot of opportunities growing up that many people don't get. I have parents that have encouraged me and supported me in my endeavours and have generally been accepting of my (often poor) lifestyle choices.
> When you come from privilege, it's much easier to have confidence that things will work out.
But yeah, the advantage of privilege is very real and you don't need Bill Gates to prove it.
The rags-to-riches in the industry doesn't exist, move along people.
Nick D'Aloisio? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_D'Aloisio)
I was confused when you mentioned him, then I realized you think he didn't succeed because he's not a billionaire or didn't create the next Facebook.
Young millionaire studying at Oxford? I would trade places with that dude in a heartbeat. From everything I'm reading on his Wikipedia page, he seems to be doing quite well.
Well-off people don’t have these problems. That random investor is just like their dad, plus or minus the Rolex, and they know their language („Have you been to Martha’s this year?“). Asking for money is not a problem either because they never experienced the process of spending money as painful - their worldview is that you have a certain budget to spend, and when it’s gone you either wait a bit or get some more.
I have asked this question to myself repeatedly and never arrived at satisfactory answer.
What pisses me off is the shear intellectual dishonesty with which these successes are reported.
Growing up my parents would always give references to such stories and make us feel how lazy we were for not succeeding like those kids.
Those who come from humble background can still make it big but only when all the stars align for them and they are too constrained to only do that one thing.
Rags to riches opportunities are risky bets and only those who can either afford the loss or don't have anything to lose and don't have any other opportunities apart from that one bet wins.
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-private-high-scho...
I never knew this info about Gates or Zuckerberg, fascinating to say the least.
I think you can do this in about 2-3 generations. So if you're not primed for success, you can work hard and kickstart the success of your kids.
Of course, lot's of tragedy occurs here when kids don't live up to parents expectations.
It does, very few parents can afford to give a 100k loan, that's a massive leg up most have no access to.
My old school district has one middle school and one high school, and pushed out the one of the best teachers I've ever had. That said, an organic chemistry class was offered, thanks entirely to the efforts of another great teacher.
I never had any real choices in my grades 6-12 education so, to me, being in a position to choose a school with a curriculum catering to one's interests and talents does seem to be a privilege many people take for granted.
It’s not just that, it’s that confidence is taught to certain classes. If you know anyone who went to “public” (i.e. private) school they all seem to have this relaxed, easygoing charm. Do they consistently make better decisions than anyone else? No, they skip straight to giving the appearance of someone who does, and it’s amazing how effective it is.
Beyond that it seems rather meaningless to attribute success to privilege over a multitude of other factors. It helps, but it's not the main component. Indeed those with the most privilege tend not to do so well. Consider rich kids who turn into generally unsuccessful adults. Clogs to clogs in 3 generations. The opposite of success.
Meanwhile you have people like JayZ who started among the least privileged (relative to the country) becoming one of the most privileged.
As for Gates, he had the drive and interest to spend his time learning how to program and explore business while he was a kid. While most of his peers were likely using that time to watch TV or party. That's an essential difference and no amount of privilege is going to bridge that.
Privilege is not binary, being born into a rich family gives you a massive amount of privilege that being born into the lower class doesn't regardless of how we compare with other countries. So your point here, is rather missing the point entirely.
Dude his drive and interest was solely determined by his physical appearance aka the fact that he considered himself ugly. If gates could choose he would have been a good looking tv watching party chad. But he was an uggo so he statusmaxxed instead.
They are/were all known for being very arrogant people. Just because some of them become billionaires doesn't mean everyone should be like that.
> How did they have the confidence to hold their own when confronted with such adults
Have you ever met a 12 year old know-it-all? Same thing.
Linus didn't win the debate vs Tanenbaum. He simply happened to be the right guy at the right place at the right time.
Not at all. Words versus deeds. There are tons of inexperienced people who talk like they know everything; but of those, very few of them actually set out to do the things that "require experience."
Say that there's a person who thinks they have an awesome idea for a game, but knows nothing about game development. It's the difference between them talking about this amazing game they want to make "one day", or maybe them posting on Upwork saying "I have an awesome idea for a game, I just need someone to build it"; and them sitting down and trying to actually build their idea themselves right now.
It's also a question of how they confront obstacles. Most people without this trait of inexhaustible self-confidence, when they realize they don't have the skills to do something, will stop trying to do it, or will shelve the project and set out to first learn those skills. (And maybe never get back to their original dream/passion, instead just using the acquired skills in more mundane ways. All of you here who got into programming because you wanted to be a game developer know what I mean.)
A person with this mindset, meanwhile, will create the best version of the thing they can right now with their limited skillset, and then keep iterating on it, improving their skills in the process of creating the thing.
For an example, there are quite a number of webcomic artists working today, who, when they started, didn't know a thing about drawing (or much of anything, being teenagers), and it shows in their first comics. But they didn't care that they didn't know how to do it well; as long as they could do it at all, they just did it, and kept doing it, drawing and publishing a strip every day. And over the years, doing so has taught them how to draw—such that now, they're great at what they do.
There are plenty of brilliant people with ideas actually executed very well that just go nowhere for whatever reason or other.
Also right team, right people, I mean, right circumstances in general. In those kinds of right circumstances, the dumb move would be not to capitalize on it.
He just kept building, even though he was aware that there was a "competitor" in the space. I mean, look at his very first Usenet post announcing Linux ("just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu") - sometimes "just keep building" is all it takes, and the established leaders have far less of an advantage than we think they do.
And, plot twist: ARM CPUs may outnumber Intel CPUs...
Society benedits from having these people around, for when conditions change, and traditional ways don't work any more.
So the extraordinary thing was extraordinary times.
(Other questions: why them and not some other teenager? And how did they transition to conventional business, structure, funding, regulations?)
When I was young I was convinced that life beyond academia in all fields would be this super serious, mega competitive space where most everyone has everything figured out. That everyone who was there, in any kind of profession, would be super smart and really know their game inside out.
When I started my career I assumed frankly that my opinions were wrong, because of this. In my first job there were a lot of aspects that were almost the parody of how not to do things, yet even though I sensed this intuitively I convinced myself probably for the first year that I must be wrong and this must just be the way things are done in industry. That I would eventually figure out that this was the right way to do things. It's quite funny to look back on that in retrospect.
What I find most impressive about tales of young company builders and leaders, the classic Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg etc, is not actually what they did but that they had the sheer temerity to do it at that age without first building their confidence in industry for a few years.
How did they know that they had the ability to build companies such as theirs -- surely were it possible one of the adults with 10-20 years industry experience would have figured it out already? How did they have the confidence to hold their own when confronted with such adults (many of whom I'm sure challenged them and competed with them for influence) as their companies grew? Truly awe inspiring.