Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

Re:Watch a VC use my name to sell a con by DeAngeloLampkin on Monday November 28, 2011 @11:52PM (#3289113)

Overall, I loved the "Wealth" essay. I do wonder though if Paul ever considers that the same thing he says about Bill Gates' success could also be said about his own.

"Bill Gates is a smart, determined, and hardworking man, but you need more than that to make as much money as he has. You also need to be very lucky."

Or perhaps PG thinks his personal success is based purely off his own brilliance with no helpful outside factors needed (i.e. competitor blunders, etc)? :)

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Re:Watch a VC use my name to sell a con by tomhoward on Tuesday November 29, 2011 @01:46AM (#3289394)

Or perhaps PG thinks his personal success is based purely off his own brilliance with no helpful outside factors needed

He doesn't think that. Though he claims to have made good decisions and benefited from competitor blunders, he frequently refers to incidents that nearly sank the company, and acknowledges the good fortune that saved them and helped them to their very happy exit.

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Re:Watch a VC use my name to sell a con by zck on Tuesday November 29, 2011 @12:05AM (#3289160)

One has to be a lot luckier to make fifty billion dollars than ten million dollars.

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Re:Watch a VC use my name to sell a con by drumdance on Tuesday November 29, 2011 @01:25AM (#3289348)

Yes, but I doubt it's, say, 50 times luckier. I'll wager it's a lot easier to go from 10 million to a billion than from zero to 10 million.

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Re:Watch a VC use my name to sell a con by _delirium on Tuesday November 29, 2011 @01:52AM (#3289412)

It's hard to come up with a good conditional probability, but just looking at the population ratios, the odds are close to the same: somewhere around 1 in 300 American households have net worth >$10m, and somewhere around 1 in 300 of those (close to 1 in 100,000 households) have net worth >$1b.

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Re:Watch a VC use my name to sell a con by neutronicus on Tuesday November 29, 2011 @07:15AM (#3290008)

Just going by the fact that the wealth distribution is fat-tailed, the (stochastic) rate at which you obtain wealth must be roughly proportional to your current wealth. Otherwise, you'd expect an exponential decay in the wealth distribution.

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Re:Watch a VC use my name to sell a con by chalst on Tuesday November 29, 2011 @06:09AM (#3289878)

Right. One has to factor into the assets that Microsoft had at the start the access to Bill Gates' dad, who was a highly successful lawyer active in technology.

Where would Microsoft's shrinkwrap sales strategy have been without legal advice?

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Re:Watch a VC use my name to sell a con by Retric on Tuesday November 29, 2011 @07:43AM (#3290081)

His mother served on the same board of directors as the IBM CEO. Which is probably why the original licensing deal was even considered and why the they where not heavy handed in their contract negotiation.

Edit: In 1980, she discussed with John Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation," her son's company. "Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates

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Re:Watch a VC use my name to sell a con by chollida1 on Tuesday November 29, 2011 @11:21AM (#3290893)

> His mother served on the same board of directors as the IBM CEO. Which is probably why the original licensing deal was even considered and why the they where not heavy handed in their contract negotiation

The first is probably true, I agree atleast. Your second point about them not being heavy handed because they knew Bill's mother I just can't see having any shred of truth.

IBM also made a sweetheart deal with Intel with no mother's involved.

The reason they made those deals has been stated many times over.

IBM was in a huge rush to ship and they needed an OS and CPU in a very bad way. They made those deals because that's what allowed them to ship.

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Re:Watch a VC use my name to sell a con by ajays on Tuesday November 29, 2011 @09:28AM (#3290394)

Thanks for posting that. These little things are often not mentioned in the success stories we hear. Was Mrs. Gates' chat with Mr. Opel the sole cause of Microsoft's success? Of course not! But opening a few doors so early on is definitely a huge stroke of good fortune.

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Re:Watch a VC use my name to sell a con by roel_v on Tuesday November 29, 2011 @03:58AM (#3289659)

Why?

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