In comparison to what? For all we know, there were dozens, maybe hundreds of other similar sites being built at the same time. Without being able to compare them, we really can't say how well he executed Facebook. Having used both Friendster and MySpace, I'd say he did better than either of them. But by the time Facebook was big enough to be mentioned in the same breath as those two, success to some large degree was already assured.
Instead, I prefer to ascribe luck to things that the individual actually had no control over, such as winning the lottery.
This is precisely the point: there may very well have been key moments in Facebook's history, over which Zuckerberg had not control whatsoever, yet which ultimately determined the company's fate. We know the economy is a nonlinear dynamical system, and in such systems small perturbations in the input can lead to large changes in the output. There's no reason to suppose that similar effects don't play a role in the life cycle of individuals or businesses.
Yes we can. If there were tons of social networking sites out there at the time, and Facebook came out on top, there must be a reason.
Yes. Luck played a big role.
The reason I say luck didn't play a big role, is because not anyone could do what he did.
Can anybody from a 5 year old to a grandmother build Facebook? If not, there must be skill required to accomplish the task.
To build the application behind Facebook alone takes skill (taking out a large percentage of the population). To build the company up to what it is (and make the right decisions) takes another set of skills. I think the luck factor is around 10%.
Of course there is a certain amount of luck with anything that we do. I have always felt that there are lucky situations all around us. Without the proper skills to recognize it, most people will just let it pass by.
Somehow conversation turns to the great generals -- the 4 and 5 star generals.
"How many great generals are there?" asks the physicist.
"No more than about 1 in 20 is a truly great general", they answer.
"How do you decide who is a 4- or 5- star general?" the physicist asks.
The army men decide that you need to have won 5 battles to be a great general.
The physicist then explains how it can easily be luck. Suppose that battle success is randomly determined. A general has a 0.5^5 chance of winning 5/5 battles out of sheer luck -- 3.125% in fact. Therefore the majority of "Great Generals" are just lucky.
The point of the anecdote is that the null hypothesis -- that 5-star generals are there basically because somebody "wins" each battle and that a fixed percentage of these will win 5 in a row -- is difficult to distinguish from genuine tactical skill.
That's the point of the article too. We too often attribute to skill what can just as reasonably be luck. Partly because of survivor bias: Zuckerberg et al are the one group out of the hundreds of contenders who succeeded in getting runaway network effects. But if contenders had non-zero chances of success, somebody was bound to succeed. The null hypothesis is that Zuckerberg was just lucky and it is basically not easy to disprove, given that as I said above there's nothing particularly unusual about him or Facebook going into the fight.
If you win, it is true that not everyone could do what you did (you were the best runner out of a thousand). It also true that luck played a HUGE role (one in a million odds after putting yourself in the right place based on skill).
Searchyc.com is your friend: http://searchyc.com/This+attitude+bugs+me+a+lot.+There+
In summary, I made a comment about Zuckerberg and the value of Facebook. Someone responded that he was lucky. To which someone else responded with this: (Can't find original HN comment)
"This attitude bugs me a lot. There is probably a path for every single person in this country to make a million dollars in the next year if they were just “savvy enough” to take advantage of it. It seems everyone wants to diminish Zuck’s success by ascribing luck to it, but let me tell you something. Zuck executed the shit out of Facebook. Did the community and mindshare just come out of thin air?
There’s no good reason to believe that Zuckerberg is lucky at all. Saying he was in the right place at the right time has this tacit assumption that if he were somewhere else at the wrong time he would have tried the same thing and fell flat on his face.
It seems because Facebook is an outlier, people feel safe talking about the luck factor, but that’s meaningless because we all exist with individual circumstances, and by that measure everything every one of us does is based on luck. Instead, I prefer to ascribe luck to things that the individual actually had no control over, such as winning the lottery."