4 ms·
To give some idea of how small a 1M company is, a non-chain Mexican restaurant in the suburbs of Virginia was making 3M / year.
by yclept 10y ago
To give some idea of how small a 1M company is, a non-chain Mexican restaurant in the suburbs of Virginia was making 3M / year.
- CarVac 10y agoOn the other hand, it matters how many people are involved in the operation. A small two or three-person tech startup making a million dollars is different from a restaurant with thirty (? estimate) employees making a million dollars.
- rpeden 10y agoIt's usually not easy to compare across industries, though. A software company with $1M revenue could easily end up with higher net profit than a restaurant with $3M revenue.
- jakozaur 10y agoThere were niche startup doing niche programming language (BASIC) with less revenue that ended up being Microsoft.
- sidlls 10y agoIs that an accurate comparison? Gates was born into weatlh and a pre-existing social network. His company's success has a foundation of winning the genetic lottery.
- rpedela 10y agoThere are millions of people who are equally as lucky as Bill Gates in terms of family economic and social status. Luck plays a role but it is not the defining factor.
- sidlls 10y ago"Millions?" How do you figure? Gates was born well into the top 1%. Tens or hundreds of thousands is more accurate. Luck isn't the deciding factor, especially in what endeavors to pursue, but it is a prominent factor in the success of those endeavors.
- rpedela 10y agoLet's say you are right that he was born into the top 1% in the US. I am not confident that is true without data but let's say that is it for the sake of argument. .01 * 330,000,000 = 3,300,000 So yes, millions. And yet there are only a handful of Americans like Bill Gates.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoIt's reasonably accurate. IMO, MS grew because of DOS. They were hoping Gary Kildall's C/PM would be the OS for the IBM PC, and only leveraged DOS "to save the language business." It's not clear how much of a factor Gates' parents' wealth and social network was in this process. Yeah, his Mom was on the board of IBM but Microsoft was an established brand already.
- sidlls 10y agoHis company didn't spring into being without a history. He had access to educational and tutoring resources, specifically technology related resources, his entire life. I'd say it's very clear his parents' circumstances were a huge factor in his early successes, and arguably much more important than those successes were to later ones.