7 ms·

I'm so tired of seeing articles like this. WHO CARES? Nothing about this story is repeatable. It deludes the masses in terms of real prospects of starting a bus

I'm so tired of seeing articles like this. WHO CARES? Nothing about this story is repeatable. It deludes the masses in terms of real prospects of starting a business. The headline alone is just clickbait. It's completely unfair, as it robs desperate people of a reality check. I wish I could downvote this.

beautybasics 8y ago
Lot people find this usedful. - They are solving problem differently - 24 year old scaled a company to $5 billion value And of course you can downvote.
- cobalt 8y ago
  you can only downvote with enough karma/rep/whatever it is here
  - dEnigma 8y ago
    Plus, you can't downvote submissions at all, even if you have the 500 karma necessary to downvote comments. The only thing you can do is to flag it.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - wolco 8y ago
      or ignore and move on to the next article.
  - malmsteen 8y ago
    omg how stupid are you guys to not get his point ?
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  All of the current major brands inspect hotels frequently. I don’t see anything different Oyo is doing, other than being in a country where people are just starting to be able to afford midscale hotels with some quality control.
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    Oyo's trick seems to be that they're not building hotels themselves (which is obviously slow and very expensive), but they're applying branding & quality control to existing unbranded hotels and taking a hefty cut in exchange for distribution. There are plenty of budget hotel chains in India (Treebo, Ginger, Lemon Tree, Fab, etc), some of which have been around for 15+ years, so obviously Oyo has done something right to leapfrog all of them.
    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
      That's called franchising and I wouldn't call it a trick since many brands, especially restaurant and hotels, have been doing it for a long time.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >- They are solving problem differently So like thousands of businesses do? >- 24 year old scaled a company to $5 billion value And that makes it useful because? It shows that another few out of billions of 20-something might also be able to do it? We already knew that from Zuckerberg.
- dEnigma 8y ago
  You can't downvote submissions, only flag them. Downvoting is reserved for comments.
SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
Well, come on, all you have to do is raise a billion from Sequoia and you too can be the Uber of <something>.
jarsin 8y ago
The funny, or disturbing, thing about this is the baby boomer generation actually believes this shit. Not sure if it's because they grew up trusting the media or what. They don't see all the smoke and mirrors associated with "success" now days.
- lovich 8y ago
  "To learn the hotel business from the ground up, he spent a year cleaning rooms at one of them" That quote for instance, is a nice way of spinning the fact that he had to get a job cleaning hotel rooms
  - point78 8y ago
    He could have probably chosen dozens of low wage jobs though
    - sh87 8y ago
      He did choose one - cleaning rooms.
    - lovich 8y ago
      What are the odds between the two options. One, he took a low wage job at a young age because that's what everyone but the rich have to do, and then spun it as a story about how he always had a vision and it makes a good story. Two is that he actually made a plan to be running an international hotel company and made calculated choices to do so, without any of the benefit of experience to inform him of what those steps would be?
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  Broad sweeping generalizations about how stupid baby boomers are tend, by and large, to be just as true as broad sweeping generalizations about how stupid millennials are.
  - njarboe 8y ago
prostoalex 8y ago
Same as stories of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg being college dropouts. Factually correct, but hardly a recipe for success for the 99% of population.
- rocgf 8y ago
  I think you need to add a bunch of 9s to that. Mark and Zuck are literally one in a billion.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    > Mark and Zuck are literally one in a billion. This is pretty unlikely, given the current US population of ~350,000,000.
    - adventured 8y ago
      The global economy being what it is, was a pre-requisite to Gates and Zuckerberg producing their immense fortunes. They could be considerable billionaires within just the US economy. They'd be hard pressed to produce $65b-$150b type fortunes without the other ~77% of the global economy and its mutually beneficial interaction with the US economy. We're very clearly not dealing with only the US population as a base to their fortunes. There are ten people worth $50 billion or more. It's a close enough estimate to say that the Gates / Zuckerberg type outcome is one in a billion. There are ~44 people worth $20 billion or more (one in 168 million people). 22 of those people come from the US (one in 15 million). Almost no matter how you cut it, these types of outcomes are extraordinarily rare.
      - thaumasiotes 8y ago
        > There are ~44 people worth $20 billion or more (one in 168 million people). 22 of those people come from the US (one in 15 million). This strongly suggests that those 22 people got their wealth more from their location in the US (eleven times the world rate!) than their personal qualities. (More accurately, that without the wealth attributable purely to being located in the US, 20 of those people would not have crossed the $20 billion threshold. But since I see at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth that the 15th richest person in the US has more than $38 billion, the wealth attributable to location would in fact appear to be the majority of the wealth.) On the pretty reasonable assumption that this also applies to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, their correct comparison pool would be the US population, and they are not at the one in a billion level. On a more fundamental level, we can easily calculate the odds of 350,000,000 people having a certain number of 1e-9 people among them. As I make it, the odds of 0 one-in-a-billion individuals in a population of 350,000,000 are 70.47% (0.999999999^350000000). The odds of exactly one such individual are 24.66% (0.999999999^349999999 × 0.000000001 × 350000000). So from first principles the odds of a population the size of the US having two or more one-in-a-billion individuals along any given dimension are less than 5%. (And a third one, like Jeff Bezos, would eat up another 4.32% of the probability space.) It's not realistic to call these people "literally one in a billion". They aren't.
subjectHarold 8y ago
Why do you think the article is aspirational? It is Bloomberg: the point of the article is to tell people about the business and the fundraising. Both are newsworthy and useful for the target audience (investors, not you). It is like buying a Toyota and then complaining because it isn't a Ferrari.
tamrix 8y ago
It's never about being a better person, helping other people or making the world a better place. It's always about how much money you make which defines your success. There's approximately 50,000 children mining minerals in unsafe underground conditions instead of going to school. If you want a harder problem to solve than making 5M, then solve that.
ryandrake 8y ago
Thank you. An article about how a lottery winner picked the right numbers is about as instructional and repeatable.
- seizethecheese 8y ago
  You can distinguish skill from luck by whether you can lose on purpose. You cannot lose the lottery on purpose, but I’m sure this guy could have failed on purpose. Sure, luck is involved, but the existence of several successful serial entrepreneurs is a heavy counterpoint.
  - jawnv6 8y ago
    you can lose roulette on purpose therefore, roulette is based on skill luck may be involved, but the existence of several successful roulette players is a heavy counterpoint
    - seizethecheese 8y ago
      You cannot lose roulette on purpose.
      - jaclaz 8y ago
        ... and additionally no successful roulette players exist (if we exclude the casino), or - if they exist - they are more rare than unicorns.
      - Dylan16807 8y ago
        Bet everything on a single number ten times.
malmsteen 8y ago
Abslute bullshit. It reinforce the point that if you are an entrepreneur, the actual reward is unbouded. that's the most important teaching of this story: employed: bounded reward, employer is activey trying to pay u the less entrepreneur: unbounded both lower and upper bounds, broke to billionaire, even at 24. Go f* yourself if you want to self-reinforce the fact that life is not a probability field whn instead it is. You COULD be richer by being an entrepreneur. you COULD also be broke so your employee choice is not so bad. Just be conscious of it.
- dang 8y ago
  Would you please stop posting uncivil and unsubstantive comments to HN? Whatever good point you have, I'm sure you can make it neutrally and politely. Please do so. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
seizethecheese 8y ago
Many of today’s successful entrepreneurs would not have taken the leap if it weren’t for the mythology generated by the example of previously successful entrepreneurs. This is a key driver of innovation and allows the startup method to spread. You're right that desperate people need a reality check, but competent, ambitious people also need a roadmap.
- intended 8y ago
  And many more have collapsed on the way side. Beware survivorship bias. The survival rate of startups is very low. Only a tiny fraction go on to be successful, and an even smaller portion go on to be unicorns. Not all startups are tech startups, and not all startups are necessarily worth the opportunity cost. The people who made a killing were investors. I think That’s where the risk reward math makes more sense, from a purely monetary perspective of course.
  - seizethecheese 8y ago
    Yes, of course. But my point is that stories of success aren’t necessarily harmful and in some ways are important.
- wolco 8y ago
  Many more died along the way.
jacquesm 8y ago
> Nothing about this story is repeatable. What do you want? A cut and paste ready business plan that will make you a billionaire? Of course there is plenty here that is repeatable: Keep your eyes open for opportunities, when you spot one work really hard at it and do not give up until you have exhausted every option. These ingredients are also present in just about every other success story. The fact that you do not see anything of value here is the heart of the problem, you could ask any entrepreneur out there that was ever moderately or more than moderately successful what made it work for them and you are likely going to hear a mix of very few elements: - a good idea - some luck - good old elbow grease - perseverance - connections You may have to weigh them differently on a case-by-case basis but that is a pretty good starting point.
- unethical_ban 8y ago
  Not taking sides, but I think you're presenting a false dichotomy. I think the point of the OP was "This is like hitting the lottery and encouraging everyone to buy numbers". Most people don't win the lottery, so don't ever expect this to happen to you, no matter how hard you try. Again, my interpretation, not opinion.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    That is true. But if you don't try you will never win. For the lottery to have winners some people would have to play the lottery. Hence the 'luck' factor (often under-rated or people pretend it is all skill).
- flashman 8y ago
  don't forget: - safety net in the form of a wealthy family - business model based on rent-seeking
  - madeuptempacct 8y ago
    The first one there is way more common than people think. The funny thing is that people will deny it vehemently. When I got my first "real" job, I wondered how my coworkers, making less than me, were justifying their BMWs and Lexuses. Then I found out that they aren't dumb, they just have 10 million dollar trust funds and having a job is a pre-condition their grandparents set.
fzeroracer 8y ago
So I'm going to draw a quick parallel here since I think that's the best way to explain my line of thought. Consider someone who plays a lot of fighting games professionally. They might start off with a 20-30% WR, but as they become more skilled they might reach 40, 50, 60% and so forth. If you lose a match the only thing you're out of is a little bit of time. To draw a comparison to startups: What is the percent of startups that are successful? 5%? 10%? If we consider how much money and time you might lose by investing into a startup I would argue that many people may only get one or two shots at it. However if you manage to be moderately successful with your first shot, you have a lot more wriggle room to grow as an entrepreneur. The heart of what I'm getting at is that I really think luck and timing is how people first find success. Which while it's nice to believe that anyone could make a successful startup the cost of failure is immense. Survivorship bias means we only see the people that are successful, especially because their successes beget more successes and more publicity. Someone earlier brought up the counterpoint that 'there are entrepreneurs that have had multiple successes therefore luck can't be involved' and my only thought was that 'maybe those early successes or safety nets allows for the dampening of bad luck'.
- sh87 8y ago
  > ... we only see the people that are successful... Try this http://autopsy.io/ http://autopsy.io/
manigandham 8y ago
> It's completely unfair, as it robs desperate people of a reality check. How is writing an article unfair? How exactly does it rob anyone of anything? What possible reality check is given by not having this article? Every single business is unique and everyone's situation is different. There's no shortcut other than just doing it, and there's always plenty to learn from every story, including this one. Failure is part of the game, and I'd much rather have people be inspired to attempt it, and have a few succeed, than nobody try at all.
- UpshotKnothole 8y ago
  I think the point is that it’s like writing articles lauding winners of 9-digit lotteries. The odds are not dissimilar, and it does no favors to people who are put under the impression that it’s a wise course to pursue.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Building a business is absolutely not like winning a lottery. There is no instant win. The vast majority is hard work on executing a plan, so that you're even in the correct place to take advantage of a lucky opportunity that comes along. Even the lottery requires you to actually buy a ticket at some point. Luck is a part of everyone's lives, but nothing happens without action. And how do you know what's a wise course for anyone else? There are stories of success and failures everywhere. Learn from them all, and do what you want.
    - UpshotKnothole 8y ago
      Building a business is absolutely not like winning a lottery. There is no instant win. I didn’t say that, and that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about s 24 year old and a $5 billion dollar business. That would make his company one of 227 active unicorns in the world, which frankly makes the lottery comparison incredibly apt.
      - manigandham 8y ago
lgregg 8y ago
Nothing is Repeatable? You could repeat everything he's doing somewhere else like Africa or South America and call it YOY. The better question is: what can you learn from other people's successes and failures? I saw three things I didn't know, off the top of my head: 1) India/China have a demand for budget travel that's clean because apparently there wasn't enough supply? 2) There is still apparently global demand because they're expanding. So, you could go copy what they're doing somewhere else. 3) His success started with a booking app? As for the title, sure, but it's just a copy of the article title which is pretty SOP on HN. He found a niche in the market with demand that lacked supply and filled the gap. Go find a niche.

beautybasics 8y ago

Lot people find this usedful. - They are solving problem differently - 24 year old scaled a company to $5 billion value And of course you can downvote.

cobalt 8y ago
you can only downvote with enough karma/rep/whatever it is here
- dEnigma 8y ago
  Plus, you can't downvote submissions at all, even if you have the 500 karma necessary to downvote comments. The only thing you can do is to flag it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - wolco 8y ago
    or ignore and move on to the next article.
- malmsteen 8y ago
  omg how stupid are you guys to not get his point ?
lotsofpulp 8y ago
All of the current major brands inspect hotels frequently. I don’t see anything different Oyo is doing, other than being in a country where people are just starting to be able to afford midscale hotels with some quality control.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  Oyo's trick seems to be that they're not building hotels themselves (which is obviously slow and very expensive), but they're applying branding & quality control to existing unbranded hotels and taking a hefty cut in exchange for distribution. There are plenty of budget hotel chains in India (Treebo, Ginger, Lemon Tree, Fab, etc), some of which have been around for 15+ years, so obviously Oyo has done something right to leapfrog all of them.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    That's called franchising and I wouldn't call it a trick since many brands, especially restaurant and hotels, have been doing it for a long time.
coldtea 8y ago
>- They are solving problem differently So like thousands of businesses do? >- 24 year old scaled a company to $5 billion value And that makes it useful because? It shows that another few out of billions of 20-something might also be able to do it? We already knew that from Zuckerberg.
dEnigma 8y ago
You can't downvote submissions, only flag them. Downvoting is reserved for comments.

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago

Well, come on, all you have to do is raise a billion from Sequoia and you too can be the Uber of <something>.

jarsin 8y ago

The funny, or disturbing, thing about this is the baby boomer generation actually believes this shit. Not sure if it's because they grew up trusting the media or what. They don't see all the smoke and mirrors associated with "success" now days.

lovich 8y ago
"To learn the hotel business from the ground up, he spent a year cleaning rooms at one of them" That quote for instance, is a nice way of spinning the fact that he had to get a job cleaning hotel rooms
- point78 8y ago
  He could have probably chosen dozens of low wage jobs though
  - sh87 8y ago
    He did choose one - cleaning rooms.
  - lovich 8y ago
    What are the odds between the two options. One, he took a low wage job at a young age because that's what everyone but the rich have to do, and then spun it as a story about how he always had a vision and it makes a good story. Two is that he actually made a plan to be running an international hotel company and made calculated choices to do so, without any of the benefit of experience to inform him of what those steps would be?
chipotle_coyote 8y ago
Broad sweeping generalizations about how stupid baby boomers are tend, by and large, to be just as true as broad sweeping generalizations about how stupid millennials are.
- njarboe 8y ago

prostoalex 8y ago

Same as stories of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg being college dropouts. Factually correct, but hardly a recipe for success for the 99% of population.

rocgf 8y ago
I think you need to add a bunch of 9s to that. Mark and Zuck are literally one in a billion.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > Mark and Zuck are literally one in a billion. This is pretty unlikely, given the current US population of ~350,000,000.
  - adventured 8y ago
    The global economy being what it is, was a pre-requisite to Gates and Zuckerberg producing their immense fortunes. They could be considerable billionaires within just the US economy. They'd be hard pressed to produce $65b-$150b type fortunes without the other ~77% of the global economy and its mutually beneficial interaction with the US economy. We're very clearly not dealing with only the US population as a base to their fortunes. There are ten people worth $50 billion or more. It's a close enough estimate to say that the Gates / Zuckerberg type outcome is one in a billion. There are ~44 people worth $20 billion or more (one in 168 million people). 22 of those people come from the US (one in 15 million). Almost no matter how you cut it, these types of outcomes are extraordinarily rare.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      > There are ~44 people worth $20 billion or more (one in 168 million people). 22 of those people come from the US (one in 15 million). This strongly suggests that those 22 people got their wealth more from their location in the US (eleven times the world rate!) than their personal qualities. (More accurately, that without the wealth attributable purely to being located in the US, 20 of those people would not have crossed the $20 billion threshold. But since I see at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth that the 15th richest person in the US has more than $38 billion, the wealth attributable to location would in fact appear to be the majority of the wealth.) On the pretty reasonable assumption that this also applies to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, their correct comparison pool would be the US population, and they are not at the one in a billion level. On a more fundamental level, we can easily calculate the odds of 350,000,000 people having a certain number of 1e-9 people among them. As I make it, the odds of 0 one-in-a-billion individuals in a population of 350,000,000 are 70.47% (0.999999999^350000000). The odds of exactly one such individual are 24.66% (0.999999999^349999999 × 0.000000001 × 350000000). So from first principles the odds of a population the size of the US having two or more one-in-a-billion individuals along any given dimension are less than 5%. (And a third one, like Jeff Bezos, would eat up another 4.32% of the probability space.) It's not realistic to call these people "literally one in a billion". They aren't.

subjectHarold 8y ago

Why do you think the article is aspirational? It is Bloomberg: the point of the article is to tell people about the business and the fundraising. Both are newsworthy and useful for the target audience (investors, not you). It is like buying a Toyota and then complaining because it isn't a Ferrari.

tamrix 8y ago

It's never about being a better person, helping other people or making the world a better place. It's always about how much money you make which defines your success. There's approximately 50,000 children mining minerals in unsafe underground conditions instead of going to school. If you want a harder problem to solve than making 5M, then solve that.

ryandrake 8y ago

Thank you. An article about how a lottery winner picked the right numbers is about as instructional and repeatable.

seizethecheese 8y ago
You can distinguish skill from luck by whether you can lose on purpose. You cannot lose the lottery on purpose, but I’m sure this guy could have failed on purpose. Sure, luck is involved, but the existence of several successful serial entrepreneurs is a heavy counterpoint.
- jawnv6 8y ago
  you can lose roulette on purpose therefore, roulette is based on skill luck may be involved, but the existence of several successful roulette players is a heavy counterpoint
  - seizethecheese 8y ago
    You cannot lose roulette on purpose.
    - jaclaz 8y ago
      ... and additionally no successful roulette players exist (if we exclude the casino), or - if they exist - they are more rare than unicorns.
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      Bet everything on a single number ten times.

malmsteen 8y ago

Abslute bullshit. It reinforce the point that if you are an entrepreneur, the actual reward is unbouded. that's the most important teaching of this story: employed: bounded reward, employer is activey trying to pay u the less entrepreneur: unbounded both lower and upper bounds, broke to billionaire, even at 24. Go f* yourself if you want to self-reinforce the fact that life is not a probability field whn instead it is. You COULD be richer by being an entrepreneur. you COULD also be broke so your employee choice is not so bad. Just be conscious of it.

dang 8y ago
Would you please stop posting uncivil and unsubstantive comments to HN? Whatever good point you have, I'm sure you can make it neutrally and politely. Please do so. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

seizethecheese 8y ago

Many of today’s successful entrepreneurs would not have taken the leap if it weren’t for the mythology generated by the example of previously successful entrepreneurs. This is a key driver of innovation and allows the startup method to spread. You're right that desperate people need a reality check, but competent, ambitious people also need a roadmap.

intended 8y ago
And many more have collapsed on the way side. Beware survivorship bias. The survival rate of startups is very low. Only a tiny fraction go on to be successful, and an even smaller portion go on to be unicorns. Not all startups are tech startups, and not all startups are necessarily worth the opportunity cost. The people who made a killing were investors. I think That’s where the risk reward math makes more sense, from a purely monetary perspective of course.
- seizethecheese 8y ago
  Yes, of course. But my point is that stories of success aren’t necessarily harmful and in some ways are important.
wolco 8y ago
Many more died along the way.

jacquesm 8y ago

> Nothing about this story is repeatable. What do you want? A cut and paste ready business plan that will make you a billionaire? Of course there is plenty here that is repeatable: Keep your eyes open for opportunities, when you spot one work really hard at it and do not give up until you have exhausted every option. These ingredients are also present in just about every other success story. The fact that you do not see anything of value here is the heart of the problem, you could ask any entrepreneur out there that was ever moderately or more than moderately successful what made it work for them and you are likely going to hear a mix of very few elements: - a good idea - some luck - good old elbow grease - perseverance - connections You may have to weigh them differently on a case-by-case basis but that is a pretty good starting point.

unethical_ban 8y ago
Not taking sides, but I think you're presenting a false dichotomy. I think the point of the OP was "This is like hitting the lottery and encouraging everyone to buy numbers". Most people don't win the lottery, so don't ever expect this to happen to you, no matter how hard you try. Again, my interpretation, not opinion.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  That is true. But if you don't try you will never win. For the lottery to have winners some people would have to play the lottery. Hence the 'luck' factor (often under-rated or people pretend it is all skill).
flashman 8y ago
don't forget: - safety net in the form of a wealthy family - business model based on rent-seeking
- madeuptempacct 8y ago
  The first one there is way more common than people think. The funny thing is that people will deny it vehemently. When I got my first "real" job, I wondered how my coworkers, making less than me, were justifying their BMWs and Lexuses. Then I found out that they aren't dumb, they just have 10 million dollar trust funds and having a job is a pre-condition their grandparents set.

fzeroracer 8y ago

So I'm going to draw a quick parallel here since I think that's the best way to explain my line of thought. Consider someone who plays a lot of fighting games professionally. They might start off with a 20-30% WR, but as they become more skilled they might reach 40, 50, 60% and so forth. If you lose a match the only thing you're out of is a little bit of time. To draw a comparison to startups: What is the percent of startups that are successful? 5%? 10%? If we consider how much money and time you might lose by investing into a startup I would argue that many people may only get one or two shots at it. However if you manage to be moderately successful with your first shot, you have a lot more wriggle room to grow as an entrepreneur. The heart of what I'm getting at is that I really think luck and timing is how people first find success. Which while it's nice to believe that anyone could make a successful startup the cost of failure is immense. Survivorship bias means we only see the people that are successful, especially because their successes beget more successes and more publicity. Someone earlier brought up the counterpoint that 'there are entrepreneurs that have had multiple successes therefore luck can't be involved' and my only thought was that 'maybe those early successes or safety nets allows for the dampening of bad luck'.

sh87 8y ago
> ... we only see the people that are successful... Try this http://autopsy.io/ http://autopsy.io/

manigandham 8y ago

> It's completely unfair, as it robs desperate people of a reality check. How is writing an article unfair? How exactly does it rob anyone of anything? What possible reality check is given by not having this article? Every single business is unique and everyone's situation is different. There's no shortcut other than just doing it, and there's always plenty to learn from every story, including this one. Failure is part of the game, and I'd much rather have people be inspired to attempt it, and have a few succeed, than nobody try at all.

UpshotKnothole 8y ago
I think the point is that it’s like writing articles lauding winners of 9-digit lotteries. The odds are not dissimilar, and it does no favors to people who are put under the impression that it’s a wise course to pursue.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Building a business is absolutely not like winning a lottery. There is no instant win. The vast majority is hard work on executing a plan, so that you're even in the correct place to take advantage of a lucky opportunity that comes along. Even the lottery requires you to actually buy a ticket at some point. Luck is a part of everyone's lives, but nothing happens without action. And how do you know what's a wise course for anyone else? There are stories of success and failures everywhere. Learn from them all, and do what you want.
  - UpshotKnothole 8y ago
    Building a business is absolutely not like winning a lottery. There is no instant win. I didn’t say that, and that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about s 24 year old and a $5 billion dollar business. That would make his company one of 227 active unicorns in the world, which frankly makes the lottery comparison incredibly apt.
    - manigandham 8y ago

lgregg 8y ago

Nothing is Repeatable? You could repeat everything he's doing somewhere else like Africa or South America and call it YOY. The better question is: what can you learn from other people's successes and failures? I saw three things I didn't know, off the top of my head: 1) India/China have a demand for budget travel that's clean because apparently there wasn't enough supply? 2) There is still apparently global demand because they're expanding. So, you could go copy what they're doing somewhere else. 3) His success started with a booking app? As for the title, sure, but it's just a copy of the article title which is pretty SOP on HN. He found a niche in the market with demand that lacked supply and filled the gap. Go find a niche.