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Zuckerberg and Gates would have been elite if they’d never worked a day in their lives. Perhaps it's just me, but in the Zuckerberg case specifically, I'd thin
by vonseel 7y ago
Zuckerberg and Gates would have been elite if they’d never worked a day in their lives.
Perhaps it's just me, but in the Zuckerberg case specifically, I'd think quite a bit of luck and timing had to do with it. If Zuckerberg had been born 10 years later after the obvious social network ideas were already created? Or if he had gone to a no-name college (or none whatsoever) and Facebook had never taken off the way it did at Harvard?
Or maybe you meant they were born elite, in which case, I don't know anything about that.
- caenorst 7y agoThey seems obvious to you now but they weren't at that time. Not that I am a Zuck fan at all but he deserve credit for that and that probably demonstrate some creativity and vision from him. No ?
- kortilla 7y agoMySpace existed. Facebook didn’t really add much beyond that to think that others wouldn’t have come up with the same idea in Zuck’s absence. In fact, the lawsuits from the Winklevos twins would seem to imply just that.
- vonseel 7y agoI would have said the same thing. I think the main value add - looking back on how I perceived FB when it came out and why a lot of us started using it - was branding and a cleaner, fresh design. And the newsfeed was a new concept...
- JshWright 7y agoThe point is that even without Facebook, he would have access to a significant amount of wealth.
- vonseel 7y agoBecause he was a Harvard student from a likely well-off family?
- throwaway100773 7y agoThe point is that Zuck and Gates had capacity to take on risk. There’s no guarantee that their risk would have paid off, but the other side of the coin wasn’t starvation and destitution. They basically had a heads I win tails I don’t lose type of situation. This is the big idea here - being born in the right situation gives you the ability to bear risk where a lower middle class kid can’t bear that risk because if things don’t work out, that kid is going to be homeless. When you can take a lot of risk with little downside, it almost always pays off in the long run.