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I think it’s so much more difficult these days to get significant success (jobs going away to AI, more competition, many of the low hanging discoveries and tech

I think it’s so much more difficult these days to get significant success (jobs going away to AI, more competition, many of the low hanging discoveries and technologies being completed - I would love to make billions writing a chat app or simple CRUD database like Facebook!) that most of us are predisposed to focus on the luck part of things and not the hard work element. I agree with you - people are missing the fact that the author was able to live on a very meagre salary for years.

deckard1 6y ago
> I would love to make billions writing a chat app In 1998 I wrote an IRC client for Linux/Gtk+. Really the first graphical app that wasn't Tcl/Tk or Motif based. Even back then people were saying "yet another IRC client", due to the fact that there were dozens of them around. I was often embarrassed to talk about my work because it just felt a bit lame and overdone. But in reality, I wasn't thinking big enough. Since then: Twitter, WhatsApp, and Slack all came along and made billions. And also Line, WeChat, Snapchat, and more. This all came after AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and others died off. Slack was not even 10 years ago. I'm still baffled at how Slack happened. Any one of us could have created it, but did not. What you should realize is that the marketplace is fluid and changes based on technology, incumbents losing their mojo (see AMD vs Intel right now), and various other factors. People often talk about first-mover advantage, but I've never seen the relevance. Facebook came after MySpace, Friendster, and others. MySpace was vastly more open, and yet Facebook, with their restricted profiles and limited availability eclipsed MySpace. Slack came into an environment with Skype and Hipchat. Microsoft and Atlassian both had deep pockets and first-mover advantage and couldn't win. Google was up against Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, and even offered itself up for sale to AltaVista for $1 million. But in the end they had the better tech and the better user experience.
- abhinav22 6y ago
  Thanks for your insight. What do you think is the secret sauce for the success of these companies? Is it marketing and grabbing mindshare? I hear a lot these days that people discount programming aspects or ideas for a product - they say rather it’s the ecosystem to take an idea and push it to the masses. Is there a common trend in these examples or do they all have their unique particulars (eg Facebook being borne out of Harvard social network)?
opportune 6y ago
Even when facebook came out there plenty of other apps like it. Same with Instagram and whatsapp. Same with the myriad delivery companies. The success comes from users rather than a revolutionary idea
- username90 6y ago
  You can have a revolutionary idea without it being a new kind of product. For example Facebook did many things very differently than its competitors. Firstly it didn't show when you looked at others profiles, all previous networks did that and it makes people think twice before interacting with it. Secondly it solved real names, people actually used their real names at Facebook which made it easy to find real friends and old friends on it. Thirdly it only had an upvote button and no downvote making posting content at worst ignored instead of having to be scared of downvotes. These three taken together greatly increased growth and user engagement. Without them Facebook would never have became a company capable of rivalling Google. Google similarly just made a much better search engine than the competition. The revolutionary idea wasn't "Lets make a search engine", but "With this algorithm we can make the best search engine in the world, and that is worth a lot!".

deckard1 6y ago

> I would love to make billions writing a chat app In 1998 I wrote an IRC client for Linux/Gtk+. Really the first graphical app that wasn't Tcl/Tk or Motif based. Even back then people were saying "yet another IRC client", due to the fact that there were dozens of them around. I was often embarrassed to talk about my work because it just felt a bit lame and overdone. But in reality, I wasn't thinking big enough. Since then: Twitter, WhatsApp, and Slack all came along and made billions. And also Line, WeChat, Snapchat, and more. This all came after AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and others died off. Slack was not even 10 years ago. I'm still baffled at how Slack happened. Any one of us could have created it, but did not. What you should realize is that the marketplace is fluid and changes based on technology, incumbents losing their mojo (see AMD vs Intel right now), and various other factors. People often talk about first-mover advantage, but I've never seen the relevance. Facebook came after MySpace, Friendster, and others. MySpace was vastly more open, and yet Facebook, with their restricted profiles and limited availability eclipsed MySpace. Slack came into an environment with Skype and Hipchat. Microsoft and Atlassian both had deep pockets and first-mover advantage and couldn't win. Google was up against Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, and even offered itself up for sale to AltaVista for $1 million. But in the end they had the better tech and the better user experience.

abhinav22 6y ago
Thanks for your insight. What do you think is the secret sauce for the success of these companies? Is it marketing and grabbing mindshare? I hear a lot these days that people discount programming aspects or ideas for a product - they say rather it’s the ecosystem to take an idea and push it to the masses. Is there a common trend in these examples or do they all have their unique particulars (eg Facebook being borne out of Harvard social network)?

opportune 6y ago

Even when facebook came out there plenty of other apps like it. Same with Instagram and whatsapp. Same with the myriad delivery companies. The success comes from users rather than a revolutionary idea

username90 6y ago
You can have a revolutionary idea without it being a new kind of product. For example Facebook did many things very differently than its competitors. Firstly it didn't show when you looked at others profiles, all previous networks did that and it makes people think twice before interacting with it. Secondly it solved real names, people actually used their real names at Facebook which made it easy to find real friends and old friends on it. Thirdly it only had an upvote button and no downvote making posting content at worst ignored instead of having to be scared of downvotes. These three taken together greatly increased growth and user engagement. Without them Facebook would never have became a company capable of rivalling Google. Google similarly just made a much better search engine than the competition. The revolutionary idea wasn't "Lets make a search engine", but "With this algorithm we can make the best search engine in the world, and that is worth a lot!".