5 ms·

Survival bias. Look it up. Also worth looking up: wishful thinking.

by hasenj 9y ago

ljw1001 9y ago
Clearly survival bias, but I think the point stands: None of these necessarily started out as "Let's be crazy ambitious" but all had the kind of impact that Graham is looking for.
- qznc 9y ago
  I believe Mark Zuckerberg (and the Winklevoss twins), Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates were all very ambitious people. I'm not sure about Brin and Page, but I guess they are as well. If they had not had the ambition and drive, the companies would have folded or sold instead of becoming huge.
  - sah2ed 9y ago
    > I'm not sure about Brin and Page, ... Larry Page was incredibly ambitious even while he was a PhD student. He naively intended to work on 3 projects. Luckily he listened to the good advice of his advisor, Terry Winograd, who asked him to narrow his focus down to the web. The quote below is excerpted from his 2009 commencement address [1]. "I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. There are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name." [1] http://googlepress.blogspot.com.ng/2009/05/larry-pages-university-of-michigan.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com.ng/2009/05/larry-pages-unive...
had2makeanacct 9y ago
Good video on this "Why you shouldn't trust successful people's advice" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k7jeQQdqPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k7jeQQdqPA
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
max_ 9y ago
Life is not a lottery. EDIT: Statements like "survival bias" are used by people that often subscribe to Narrative Fallacies. Companies like GOOG, FACE, APPL, MSFT are not successful because they won some big lottery. They are successful because the identified "objectives" and made the right calculations to those objectives. And if they stop making the right calculations to their ojectives they WILL end up like Kodak, Nokia & HP
- tyingq 9y ago
  You don't think some amount of luck is involved? I believe most of your example successes had moments where they avoided failure only via outside factors they didn't predict, control, etc.
  - max_ 9y ago
    "Luck" strikes every-one once in a while. What matters is whether you are ready or not. To make use of your "Luck"
    - tyingq 9y ago
      I don't feel like that's the case every time. Sometimes you make the right decision for the wrong reasons. Or your bad decisions, by way of luck, end up not hurting you. Bill Gates, for example, initially declined IBM's approaches to build DOS for them. He declined, and referred them to Gary Kildall. IBM only came back to Gates because the deal with Kildall fell apart. There was no vision, skill, etc, in that sequence of events. Just luck. I imagine other highly successful people could point out similar stories in their past. Gates likely would have been successful either way, but perhaps not to the same degree.
    - taneq 9y ago
      What's that saying, again? "Luck is where preparation meets opportunity"?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
randomsearch 9y ago
> Survival bias. Look it up I think this list is a good argument against survival bias. Google had a fantastic product, which really worked. They tested on a small number of users and found it to be fantastic. They scaled that. There is a clear logical explanation for why they succeeded. You could say "well, they may have failed at scaling". How hard is it to scale from where they already were, with such a good product? Not very hard, I'd say. Let's assume your argument holds, and that many other groups had the same idea and didn't succeed. So they must have gotten at least as far as Google in getting their product done and tested by a decent sized group of users. So maybe 100s or 1000s of people were using their product on a daily basis. In which case, why don't we hear about those products? I think you can treat survival bias seriously when there is a large element of luck involved. In the Google story, I don't see much luck. I see a really good idea that worked and was then brought to market.
- hasenj 9y ago
  > Google had a fantastic product, which really worked. Lots of people think they have fantastic products. Lots of products take off without being fantastic. Lots of products can be really fantastic but never manage to take off.
  - randomsearch 9y ago
    > Lots of people think they have fantastic products. Google didn't think they had a fantastic product. They _had_ one, it was pretty self-evident that the search engine was a great deal better than any competitor, and they had empirical evidence that many other people agreed (as they were using the engine). > Lots of products take off without being fantastic. I'm not sure that's true. I can't think of any examples of terrible products that have been hugely successful. I can think of examples of products that _became_ terrible after success or monopoly had been achieved. > Lots of products can be really fantastic but never manage to take off. It took me less than a minute using Google to see that it would conquer the world. Same for my colleagues. I think really you mean "good". _Fantastic_ products are by definition super-useful, popular, have instant appeal.
tim333 9y ago
Survival bias would be saying these companies started easily so it's easy, ignoring the failures. However I don't think that was the posters point. The point was nearly all the big companies started trying something modest that grew more than a grand plan to take over the world.

Survival bias. Look it up. Also worth looking up: wishful thinking.

by hasenj 9y ago

Survival bias. Look it up. Also worth looking up: wishful thinking.

Clearly survival bias, but I think the point stands: None of these necessarily started out as "Let's be crazy ambitious" but all had the kind of impact that Graham is looking for.

qznc 9y ago
I believe Mark Zuckerberg (and the Winklevoss twins), Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates were all very ambitious people. I'm not sure about Brin and Page, but I guess they are as well. If they had not had the ambition and drive, the companies would have folded or sold instead of becoming huge.
- sah2ed 9y ago
  > I'm not sure about Brin and Page, ... Larry Page was incredibly ambitious even while he was a PhD student. He naively intended to work on 3 projects. Luckily he listened to the good advice of his advisor, Terry Winograd, who asked him to narrow his focus down to the web. The quote below is excerpted from his 2009 commencement address [1]. "I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. There are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name." [1] http://googlepress.blogspot.com.ng/2009/05/larry-pages-university-of-michigan.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com.ng/2009/05/larry-pages-unive...

had2makeanacct 9y ago

Good video on this "Why you shouldn't trust successful people's advice" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k7jeQQdqPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k7jeQQdqPA

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

max_ 9y ago

Life is not a lottery. EDIT: Statements like "survival bias" are used by people that often subscribe to Narrative Fallacies. Companies like GOOG, FACE, APPL, MSFT are not successful because they won some big lottery. They are successful because the identified "objectives" and made the right calculations to those objectives. And if they stop making the right calculations to their ojectives they WILL end up like Kodak, Nokia & HP

tyingq 9y ago
You don't think some amount of luck is involved? I believe most of your example successes had moments where they avoided failure only via outside factors they didn't predict, control, etc.
- max_ 9y ago
  "Luck" strikes every-one once in a while. What matters is whether you are ready or not. To make use of your "Luck"
  - tyingq 9y ago
    I don't feel like that's the case every time. Sometimes you make the right decision for the wrong reasons. Or your bad decisions, by way of luck, end up not hurting you. Bill Gates, for example, initially declined IBM's approaches to build DOS for them. He declined, and referred them to Gary Kildall. IBM only came back to Gates because the deal with Kildall fell apart. There was no vision, skill, etc, in that sequence of events. Just luck. I imagine other highly successful people could point out similar stories in their past. Gates likely would have been successful either way, but perhaps not to the same degree.
  - taneq 9y ago
    What's that saying, again? "Luck is where preparation meets opportunity"?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

randomsearch 9y ago

> Survival bias. Look it up I think this list is a good argument against survival bias. Google had a fantastic product, which really worked. They tested on a small number of users and found it to be fantastic. They scaled that. There is a clear logical explanation for why they succeeded. You could say "well, they may have failed at scaling". How hard is it to scale from where they already were, with such a good product? Not very hard, I'd say. Let's assume your argument holds, and that many other groups had the same idea and didn't succeed. So they must have gotten at least as far as Google in getting their product done and tested by a decent sized group of users. So maybe 100s or 1000s of people were using their product on a daily basis. In which case, why don't we hear about those products? I think you can treat survival bias seriously when there is a large element of luck involved. In the Google story, I don't see much luck. I see a really good idea that worked and was then brought to market.

hasenj 9y ago
> Google had a fantastic product, which really worked. Lots of people think they have fantastic products. Lots of products take off without being fantastic. Lots of products can be really fantastic but never manage to take off.
- randomsearch 9y ago
  > Lots of people think they have fantastic products. Google didn't think they had a fantastic product. They _had_ one, it was pretty self-evident that the search engine was a great deal better than any competitor, and they had empirical evidence that many other people agreed (as they were using the engine). > Lots of products take off without being fantastic. I'm not sure that's true. I can't think of any examples of terrible products that have been hugely successful. I can think of examples of products that _became_ terrible after success or monopoly had been achieved. > Lots of products can be really fantastic but never manage to take off. It took me less than a minute using Google to see that it would conquer the world. Same for my colleagues. I think really you mean "good". _Fantastic_ products are by definition super-useful, popular, have instant appeal.

tim333 9y ago

Survival bias would be saying these companies started easily so it's easy, ignoring the failures. However I don't think that was the posters point. The point was nearly all the big companies started trying something modest that grew more than a grand plan to take over the world.