Luck. And capturing strong network effect.

The ascents of the era all feel like examples of anti-markets, of having gotten yourself into an intermediary position where you control both side's access.

Success happens when luck meets hard work.

And timing

Every billionaire could have died from childhood cancer.

This is just a cope for people who aren't successful. Most people who are successful have a massive string of failed attempts in their past, but they're good at picking themselves back up and trying again and following through when "luck" finally strikes.

What "massive string of failed attempts" did Zuckerberg or Bezos ever accumulate?

They failed to not go to an Ivy League school and failed to have poor parents.

Alexa, Metaverse, being decent human beings

When you are still one of the top 3 richest people in the world after your mistake, that is not a "failure" in the way normal people experience it. That is just passing the time.

Or Gates or Buffet.

That claim is just patently false.

This might be true for a normal definition of success, but not lottery-winner style success like Facebook. If you look at Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Google, and so on, the founders all have few or zero previous attempts at starting a business. My theory is that this leads them to pursue risky behavior that more experienced leaders wouldn't try, and because they were in the right place at the right time, that earned them the largest rewards.

Not true of Netflix, founder came from PayPal. Apple required founder to leave and learn with a bunch of other companies like Pixar and next.

This is just cope for people with a massive string of failed attempts and no successes.

Daddy's giving you another $50,000 because he loves you, not because he expects your seventh business (blockchain for yoga studio class bookings) is going to go any better than the last six.

IMO this strengthens the case for luck. If the probability of winning the lottery is P, then trying N times gives you a probability of 1-(1-P)^N.

Who's more likely to win, someone with one lottery ticket or someone with a hundred?

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

Some will read this and laser in on the "socialism" part, but obviously the interesting bit is the second half of the quote.

That phrase explains the US Health Care System

this is also just cope

Ability vastly increases your luck surface area. A single poker hand has a lot of luck, and even a game, but over long periods, ability starts to strongly differentiate peoples' results.

Win a monster pot and you can play a lot of more interesting hands.

Except you can play hundreds of thousands of poker hands in your lifetime, but only have time/energy/money to start a handful of businesses.

Sure, but within running a single business, there are a huge number of individual events. Those are the hands.

That's where the analogy starts to fall apart then. Because the variance in those decisions is not very similar, since you're sampling very different underlying distributions. And estimating the priors for a problem like "what is the optimal arrangement of tables to maximize throughput in a cafe" is very different from a problem like "what is the current untapped/potential demand for a boardgaming cafe in this city, and how profitable would that business be".

The main reason why professional poker players are playing the long-game, is because they're consistently playing the same game. Over and over.

Heh yes, it's not as controlled, but there are repeated tasks like analysis, communicating, intuiting things, creating things, etc. And the tasks have more variability, but if you're better at these skills, you'll tend to do better. And if you do much better at a lot of them, then you're more likely to succeed than someone working on the same business who isn't very good at them. Starting a business is also a long game with a lot of these subtasks.

People also underestimate the value of maximizing opportunities for luck. If we think of luck as random external chance that we can't control, then what can we control? Doing things that increase your exposure to opportunities without spreading yourself too thin is the key. Easier said than done to strike that balance, but getting out there and trying a lot of things is a viable strategy even if only a few of them pay off. The trick is deciding how long to stick with something that doesn't appear to be working out.

Sure helps to be born wealthy, go to private school, and Ivy League college.