4 ms·

> My conclusion: If you happen to be in college during a technological revolution, you won the lottery and should start a company. Otherwise, you are better off

by dkrich 8y ago

> My conclusion: If you happen to be in college during a technological revolution, you won the lottery and should start a company. Otherwise, you are better off learning, accumulate resources, and founding late in your career. This seems to be major selectivity bias. Let's call the development of the internet a major technological revolution. How many successful startups have emerged over the time since that revolution began? AOL was started in what, the early 90's? Yahoo was started in the mid-90's. Google was started in the late-90's. Facebook was started in 2004. Twitter, 2007? AirBnB, 2009? Stitch Fix, 2015 or so? The idea that there's a small window to create a valuable startup right after a tech revolution has begun seems to make sense at first glance, but after more thorough investigation pretty much falls apart. There's never an easy time to create a company like that. It requires intelligence, connections, luck, execution, persistence, and a million other factors. Put another way, if anyone could go back to 1995 knowing what they know now, I would bet that almost nobody could recreate Google or Facebook because of all the hidden difficulties of launching them that is glossed over now that we are 15+ years out from their launches. Meanwhile, a guy like Bill Gates would probably have enormous success in pretty much any line of business (albeit not at the scale that Microsoft has had), but far greater than the average founder.

jacobush 8y ago
Yes, as long as we don't mythologize Bill as having something innate only going for him. He has that but he also had Old Money and Family. Not trying to rain on anyone, just putting things in perspective. Bill's a super talented dude.
- pdfernhout 8y ago
  Bill Gates is indeed talented and hard working -- and generous in some ways. He also dumpster-dived to learn how to write good software from looking at other people's code without their explicit permission: https://patch.com/california/losaltos/microsoft-co-founder-paul-allen-recounts-his-days-of-7a8784789a https://patch.com/california/losaltos/microsoft-co-founder-p... "That phase of Allen's life involved taking the bus–sports coat, tie, leather briefcase and all—down to the offices of local computer gurus. "I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen."" And MS-DOS is based in part on CP/M's design: "MS-DOS paternity suit settled: Computer pioneer Kildall vindicated, from beyond the grave" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit_resolved/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit... "Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software became the basis of Microsoft's MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its dominance of the PC industry. But history has overlooked the contribution of Kildall, who Evans justifiably described as "the true founder of the personal computer revolution and the father of PC software" in a book published three years ago. In a chapter devoted to Kildall in Evans' They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, Evans related how Paterson "[took] 'a ride on' Kildall's operating system, appropriated the 'look and feel' of [Kildall's] CP/M operating system, and copied much of his operating system interface from CP/M."" If you want to get away with such things, it helps to start rich, of course: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ "William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars." And to have free legal advice from his father (a lawyer). Contrast all that with the hypocritical letter Bill Gates wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?" So wrote the millionaire dumpster diver who could afford to write free software his whole life -- but chose instead to resell an OS that ripped-off someone else's hard work (one reason IBM may have wanted to keep an arms-length distance from MS-DOS instead of buying it outright). Those are hypocritical words to anyone who knows more of the story, but brilliant marketing -- including the rhetorical deception about how much time free software developers might have (such as ones at universities or government labs or students like, then, Linus Torvalds). [Stuff I previously mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15772233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15772233 ] To be clear: just because Bill Gates did stuff like that in his teens and 20s does not mean he would do stuff like that now. He many have grown as a person in many ways over the past few decades (e.g. the Gates Foundation).
  - dkrich 8y ago
    The comments from that post about his best decision being born to a wealthy family are so moronic. Sure, the connections probably helped him stay out of trouble, go to better schools, etc. But to say that he owes his success to his wealth is absurd. I would argue that extreme wealth for most people would inhibit ambitions, not enhance them. I would also argue that today most entrepreneurs wouldn't peruse publicly available Github repos to learn how to code, let alone dumpster dive for printouts of code to study. Some might view that as playing dirty, I would say it shows an incredible amount of ambition and drive. After all, he could have been getting drunk at Harvard and studying pre-law like everyone else was there in the 70's.
nostrademons 8y ago
I think the fallacy isn't in the importance of timing, but the idea that there is one definite point in time in which a technology revolution happens, and if you happen to miss it, wups, sucks to be you. Most technology revolutions have an "epicycles upon epicycles" structure, where the revolutionary technology spawns many other revolutionary technologies, sometimes decades later. The microcomputer, for example, was a revolutionary technology in 1975, and within a year had spawned two of the current tech giants (Microsoft and Apple). But whither Visicalc (1979) or Adobe (1982) in that narrative? It took time for the public to adopt microcomputers and the development platforms to stabilize before you could really build on them and create successful applications. And then the microcomputer itself spawned the WWW, which actually was developed on workstations (1989) before microcomputers were powerful enough to run it, but gained adoption (Netscape, 1995) when consumer OSes started shipping a TCP/IP stack. A whole slate of massive web companies were spawned in 1995 (Netscape, Amazon, EBay, Yahoo, Google) because they were in a place to catch the technology revolution - but Facebook didn't get started until 2004 and AirBnB didn't take off until 2009, again because it took time for social practices to catch up to the technology. The lesson for entrepreneurs, perhaps, is to pay careful attention to the world as it exists when you're founding your company, and look at where the trends are going. There are certainly worse times than others to found a company, and they're often towards the end of a technology wave: 2001/2002 was absolutely brutal to Web 1.0 companies, and I can't think of a single mobile startup founded in 2013-2015 that succeeded. But Ethereum, Consensys, Gemini, Brave, and other blockchain startups founded 2014-2015 are doing great; you just had to catch the next technology wave instead of the previous one.
hiram112 8y ago
> AOL was started in what, the early 90's? Yahoo was started in the mid-90's. Google was started in the late-90's. Facebook was started in 2004. Twitter, 2007? AirBnB, 2009? Stitch Fix, 2015 or so? One of these companies does not belong... :)
- dkrich 8y ago
  Which one, Stitch Fix? Because I'd disagree that a publicly-traded company worth over $4 billion that was started by two people in an apartment doesn't belong in the conversation of successful startups that used the development of the internet as the basis for their success.

by dkrich 8y ago

jacobush 8y ago

Yes, as long as we don't mythologize Bill as having something innate only going for him. He has that but he also had Old Money and Family. Not trying to rain on anyone, just putting things in perspective. Bill's a super talented dude.

pdfernhout 8y ago
Bill Gates is indeed talented and hard working -- and generous in some ways. He also dumpster-dived to learn how to write good software from looking at other people's code without their explicit permission: https://patch.com/california/losaltos/microsoft-co-founder-paul-allen-recounts-his-days-of-7a8784789a https://patch.com/california/losaltos/microsoft-co-founder-p... "That phase of Allen's life involved taking the bus–sports coat, tie, leather briefcase and all—down to the offices of local computer gurus. "I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen."" And MS-DOS is based in part on CP/M's design: "MS-DOS paternity suit settled: Computer pioneer Kildall vindicated, from beyond the grave" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit_resolved/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit... "Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software became the basis of Microsoft's MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its dominance of the PC industry. But history has overlooked the contribution of Kildall, who Evans justifiably described as "the true founder of the personal computer revolution and the father of PC software" in a book published three years ago. In a chapter devoted to Kildall in Evans' They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, Evans related how Paterson "[took] 'a ride on' Kildall's operating system, appropriated the 'look and feel' of [Kildall's] CP/M operating system, and copied much of his operating system interface from CP/M."" If you want to get away with such things, it helps to start rich, of course: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ "William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars." And to have free legal advice from his father (a lawyer). Contrast all that with the hypocritical letter Bill Gates wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?" So wrote the millionaire dumpster diver who could afford to write free software his whole life -- but chose instead to resell an OS that ripped-off someone else's hard work (one reason IBM may have wanted to keep an arms-length distance from MS-DOS instead of buying it outright). Those are hypocritical words to anyone who knows more of the story, but brilliant marketing -- including the rhetorical deception about how much time free software developers might have (such as ones at universities or government labs or students like, then, Linus Torvalds). [Stuff I previously mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15772233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15772233 ] To be clear: just because Bill Gates did stuff like that in his teens and 20s does not mean he would do stuff like that now. He many have grown as a person in many ways over the past few decades (e.g. the Gates Foundation).
- dkrich 8y ago
  The comments from that post about his best decision being born to a wealthy family are so moronic. Sure, the connections probably helped him stay out of trouble, go to better schools, etc. But to say that he owes his success to his wealth is absurd. I would argue that extreme wealth for most people would inhibit ambitions, not enhance them. I would also argue that today most entrepreneurs wouldn't peruse publicly available Github repos to learn how to code, let alone dumpster dive for printouts of code to study. Some might view that as playing dirty, I would say it shows an incredible amount of ambition and drive. After all, he could have been getting drunk at Harvard and studying pre-law like everyone else was there in the 70's.

nostrademons 8y ago

I think the fallacy isn't in the importance of timing, but the idea that there is one definite point in time in which a technology revolution happens, and if you happen to miss it, wups, sucks to be you. Most technology revolutions have an "epicycles upon epicycles" structure, where the revolutionary technology spawns many other revolutionary technologies, sometimes decades later. The microcomputer, for example, was a revolutionary technology in 1975, and within a year had spawned two of the current tech giants (Microsoft and Apple). But whither Visicalc (1979) or Adobe (1982) in that narrative? It took time for the public to adopt microcomputers and the development platforms to stabilize before you could really build on them and create successful applications. And then the microcomputer itself spawned the WWW, which actually was developed on workstations (1989) before microcomputers were powerful enough to run it, but gained adoption (Netscape, 1995) when consumer OSes started shipping a TCP/IP stack. A whole slate of massive web companies were spawned in 1995 (Netscape, Amazon, EBay, Yahoo, Google) because they were in a place to catch the technology revolution - but Facebook didn't get started until 2004 and AirBnB didn't take off until 2009, again because it took time for social practices to catch up to the technology. The lesson for entrepreneurs, perhaps, is to pay careful attention to the world as it exists when you're founding your company, and look at where the trends are going. There are certainly worse times than others to found a company, and they're often towards the end of a technology wave: 2001/2002 was absolutely brutal to Web 1.0 companies, and I can't think of a single mobile startup founded in 2013-2015 that succeeded. But Ethereum, Consensys, Gemini, Brave, and other blockchain startups founded 2014-2015 are doing great; you just had to catch the next technology wave instead of the previous one.

hiram112 8y ago

> AOL was started in what, the early 90's? Yahoo was started in the mid-90's. Google was started in the late-90's. Facebook was started in 2004. Twitter, 2007? AirBnB, 2009? Stitch Fix, 2015 or so? One of these companies does not belong... :)

dkrich 8y ago
Which one, Stitch Fix? Because I'd disagree that a publicly-traded company worth over $4 billion that was started by two people in an apartment doesn't belong in the conversation of successful startups that used the development of the internet as the basis for their success.