You overplay your hand. There is a very large luck component to it, sure. But I mentor at entrepreneurship events, and there is a very wide distribution of people who want to start companies. Some of those people are obviously more suited to the work than others.

I think that's especially true for people who, like WhatsApp, do things that are different than the common wisdom [1]. I had dinner recently with a friend who worked for Jeff Bezos years ago. She remembered Bezos coming into a meeting in something like 1999 excited about eInk and how it was the future for electronic books. Everybody single person in the room thought he was crazy. They didn't get the Kindle out the door until 2007, and most people thought it was crazy then. But it worked.

You could call that pure luck, but I think that's only true in the most abstract sense, where everything we are is luck.

[1] http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/77211282835/four-numbe...

If Mark Zuckerberg was a freshman in college again in 2014, what chances do you give him of creating a $170B company in the next decade? How about in his lifetime? How about a $1B company in his lifetime?

I'd say on the order of 1. 1 in a billion 2. 1 in 100 million. 2. 1 in a million.

Sure he is smart and driven and has had every opportunity available to the one guy on planet earth who will achieve what he has. But that doesn't mean he's qualitatively different than the millions of others equally intelligent and talented who didn't buy the winning ticket.

Pretty slim because Facebook exists in 2014 buddy.

Your problem is that you're associating the biggest most overhyped entrepreneurs as being the typical entrepreneur. And they indeed do hit huge luck. So you're right there.

What the media doesn't talk about -- are the thousands of founders running profitable companies in the tens of millions or even low hundreds of millions.

If you do something of value to society, the world will make you rich with a smile on its face.

No I agree completely there. I think we all have reasonably good chances of creating successful small businesses and extracting our fair value out of society of a few million or even 10 million. But to start something that grows to billions or tens or hundreds of billions that quickly--that isn't skill, that's luck. It takes being the kind of guy who can make the 5 million dollar successful small business to have a chance to play the lottery, but I'm saying that most HN readers are of opportunity to play that lottery. Zuck is much, much different than the typical member of planet earth, but not MUCH (a little better, I'll give him that) than the average silicon valley engineer.

> If you do something of value to society, the world will make you rich with a smile on its face.

Said no teacher, cancer researcher, etc. ever

That's one way to look at it. But there are what, 2 million freshmen a year? If we start slotting random freshmen into Mark Zuckerberg's room at Harvard, how many of them would have made it to be a billionaire?

Yes, he got lucky. (Which I already acknowledged.) But successful founders aren't "just lucky".

If in this "what if" scenario we assume the 2014 freshman Zuckerberg has the same drive as the 2004 one, then I would say that the odds of him becoming decently successful (whatever that might mean) would be pretty high.

If you look back at his history, he had a string of very college-student-useful projects before Facebook. He knew he was onto something. Assuming that he would have the same kind of curiosity/initiative/wtv in 2014, chances are he would find new problems to solve.