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I worked my way through college as a mover (and came out the other side with high 5-figure debt). Many of the older guys I worked with had drug habits. I worked

I worked my way through college as a mover (and came out the other side with high 5-figure debt). Many of the older guys I worked with had drug habits. I worked 16-hour days with those guys. They'd get on me for not running up stairs, for packing with too little paper around glass, for setting things down more than once. None wrote articles entitled "How to Work Hard." None knew Warren Buffet as a child (see Gates). None attended the most expensive schools, if they had they certainly wouldn't have chosen to drop out because they got bored or were unfulfilled (see Graham and Zuck). Take a look at the top 10 highest valued YC startups. All their founders came from schools with less than 10% acceptance rates. Privilege is what I'm getting at. Having an income 300:1 your lowest paid employee is disturbing. Making millions or billions off speculative, debt-fueled VC is disturbing. Proselyting your brand of success is disturbing. Recommendation: every time a founder, investor or businessperson starts to wax poetic on virtue, look for an angle. Why do founders want to appear virtuous and hardworking? Why do we need that from them? How else can they justify making sometimes up to 50% of their companies entire payroll? How emotionally satisfying must it be for Graham and his ilk to tell you why they got what they have? What if most of serious wealth and success is decided at birth?

CheezeIt 5y ago
It isn’t, obviously, because look at the example of Bill Gates: starting a business as a 20-year-old college dropout puts you at a big disadvantage compared to people with more life experience.
- j-krieger 5y ago
  The difference being that gates was never in any real danger. His credits didn't disappear. He lived in a paid for apartment. He did not have to worry about money, and if he chose, he could've gone back to college at any time. It only puts you at a 'disadvantage' in business circles, because there's a slight chance that people with more experience will not take you as seriously
- rgifford 5y ago
  Take a look at the faces on the Forbes list and get back to me. Just how white, male and western are they exactly? It's not that Gates wasn't smart or hardworking. It's just that it's easy to be hardworking and ambitious when you had books growing up, proper nutrition, when your parents stayed together, when you're in good health, when you got tutors and went to great schools, when you were engaged in extracurriculars, when you lived in an affluent society, when your parents were well connected, and on and on and on. Are his contributions to humanity worth 60B+? Scientific discovery springs up in a bunch of places simultaneously and organically. I have to assume his contribution to society would've too, maybe with a smaller amount of value extracted to his personal fortune? He's a philanthropist now, so that's good. I would be too the way social and political tides are turning. Funny how philanthropic the wealthy become. Even Epstein.
  - CheezeIt 5y ago
    Having good health, proper nutrition, and extracurriculars in an affluent society, i.e. having two parents who don’t suck, is a regular American baseline that public school kids experience. Gates’s particular advantages were being smart and having access to computers in high school in his day, which countered the bad luck of not being born a few years earlier such that he’d encounter computing in college with the same lead time before the 8086. Of course he found some great luck in business, too, well after the company was established and had employees on the payroll.
    - tolbish 5y ago
      > Gates’s particular advantages were being smart and having access to computers in high school in his day That's a rather inaccurate description of his advantages.
      - CheezeIt 5y ago
        If that’s inaccurate, tell us what gives us more bits of information distinguishing him from the general population born in the same year he is. The smart part puts him in the 0.1%, 10 bits right there, and early access to computers adds another rare multiplier to that.
- RC_ITR 5y ago
  The Bill Gates Mythology in this essay is a bit odd though. No doubt a hard worker, but the claim >"Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business in his era, but he was also among the hardest working. "I never took a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one." doesn't align with the facts that have recently emerged about him. [1] Maybe PG should examine selection bias and self-reporting bias a bit more before making the claim he does here. [1]https://nypost.com/2021/05/10/bill-gates-womanizer-held-nude-pool-parties-biographer/ https://nypost.com/2021/05/10/bill-gates-womanizer-held-nude...
  - munificent 5y ago
    From the linked article: Another ex, Jill Bennett — described as his “first serious girlfriend” — said they split because of Gates’ fixation with working long hours. “In the end, it was difficult to sustain a relationship with someone who could boast a ‘seven-hour turnaround’ — meaning that from the time he left Microsoft to the time he returned in the morning was a mere seven hours,” she told Wallace. I don't see that being a "womanizer" is in any way incompatible with being a workaholic.
    - RC_ITR 5y ago
      Again. He claimed not a single day off, which is insanely unhealthy and almost certainly untrue if he had time for naked pool parties. I’m not claiming he was lazy, just asking “why take his provable lie at face value?”
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - conductr 5y ago
    I don’t see misalignment at all. I see complete irrelevance between that quote and the facts. Why can he not be a womanizing workaholic? They are not mutually exclusive and possibly actually correlated. Sex lives need to be private or at least not included as judgement of individual as they are not relevant at all to people’s accomplishments in politics, business, academics, or any other facet of an individual’s life.
ipnon 5y ago
Not all hardworking and talented people become successful, but all successful people are talented and hardworking. Some people are born with better chances than others, but we should strive to make a society where at least most people are born with a good chance.
- rgifford 5y ago
  > ...all successful people are talented and hardworking. I doubt it. Most measures of economic mobility show this is becoming less and less true -- if it ever was. I think believing it is important though.
  - ipnon 5y ago
    Suppose someone is average and lazy. They're practically guaranteed to live a life of coasting by from job to job, living paycheck to paycheck, and struggling to get by in America these days. That is not success by my measure.
    - rgifford 5y ago
      What if that someone is average and lazy in their work to devote the rest of their time to their family? What if they raise a bunch of kids that love their parents, care about each other and the world and want to make it better? Would that be success? What if they were molested and use drugs to cope, but live their entire life without molesting anyone else? Would that be success? What if they have serious depression and they check out by playing video games, but they don't kill themselves? Would that be success? Holding up a few spectacular achievements as the paragon of human experience is fucking stupid. I genuinely think really rich (and smart) people do it to try to salve their guilt and signal for others.
      - ipnon 5y ago
        Yes, in general, but in the context of the original article success would be defined as higher education, well-paying job, able and healthy body, etc.
j-krieger 5y ago
> What if most of serious wealth and success is decided at birth? There is no 'what if'. It's just a fact. You can pretty accurately predict what a child will be able to attain in life by looking at their zip code.
- emadabdulrahim 5y ago
  While I'm not naive to not see that life is inherently unequal, I completely disagree with you. I know plenty people, including myself, who not only had the wrong zip code, they didn't even have a zip code. Somehow they made it. You can get lucky after you're born. And if you work hard, you can increase your luck odds. Also, why zip code is the axiom here? I'd say having good parents is more significant than being born in the right zip code. Who's to say?
  - hallway_monitor 5y ago
    Nobody's to say. For some reason some people think that statistics dictate reality when obviously they just take an average. The zip code thingy is silly, but on average more expensive zip codes produce children with higher incomes.
    - rgifford 5y ago
      Stats measure our shared experience. Is there something better for this? The human spirit isn't unconquerable. Believing it is has the side effect that you write off others because, "try harder." Vertasium did a fairly convincing bit on the zip code thing, which is -- I think -- why it's top of mind: https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I I encourage you to dig into economic data and not use your experience as a frame of reference for the economic reality of others.
      - thisismyswamp 5y ago
        Statistics wash away any hint of individuality
    - 5y ago
varispeed 5y ago
> Having an income 300:1 your lowest paid employee is disturbing I can imagine how and why communist revolutions were so "successful". This ratio simply shows theft from the workers. Probably, if we don't get a regulation in that area, so that let's say the maximum ratio could be no more than 10:1 and heavily tax capital gains, dividends and other means that privilege class use to extract value without having to work for it, this history will repeat itself. In some western countries, extreme left parties gain huge support, because people are simply fed up of reading that e.g. Amazon got another record year while they themselves have to sleep in a tent because they cannot afford paying rent.
- ipnon 5y ago
  The Russian communist revolution succeeded because Tsarist Russia was brutal and despotic, and the brutal and despotic Bolsheviks were merely the lesser of two evils and better fighters. The Chinese communist revolution succeeded because the Chinese Communist Party waged a guerilla war while the Nationalist army fought the Japanese invasion by themselves. Once the invasion was defeated the Chinese Communist Party fought a brutal conventional war marked by long sieges where 100,000s of city dwellers starved to death. I think political and military factors are underrated as explanations for the success of communist revolutions compared to social and economic factors.
KerrickStaley 5y ago
> Take a look at the top 10 highest valued YC startups. All their founders came from schools with less than 10% acceptance rates. This is not true. AirBnB is the top valued company that went through YC [1]. AirBnB was founded by Brian Chesky among others. Brian Chesky went to the Rhode Island School of Design [2]. The RISD had an acceptance rate of 20% in 2020. [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Chesky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Chesky [3] https://www.risd.edu/about https://www.risd.edu/about
- easton 5y ago
  I'm not going down the list because I don't have time at the moment, but #2 is DoorDash, and the two founders with Wikipedia pages went to Berkeley and Stanford. Both schools with lower acceptance rates.
- j2kun 5y ago
  Your point is not very well taken, because RISD is an extremely prestigious design school.
jdross 5y ago
I was a mover and then I ran a moving company. I love movers and the culture of people who work with their hands. They tend to be much funnier than office workers. I realize yours is a common reality, but it's not been my experience. I always felt surrounded by underdogs, and our privilege mostly came from former underdogs choosing to bet on me. My parents are middle class New Yorkers. I went to a public high school, ran track, skateboarded and played with computers and programming for fun. I went to Wash U in St Louis on financial scholarship. A great school but not the ones that tech companies recruit aggressively from. My freshman year I bootstrapped a moving company and a custom apparel company, and I worked constantly at both on top of a full course load for a double major and social obligations. I probably couldn't do that today, but it didn't feel like work then. It was fun. Both of those companies did well enough that I got introduced to Joe Lonsdale as he was starting Addepar, and I made enough money from them to pay off all debts and enter adult life with over 150k in savings. I joined Addepar my sophomore summer. It was me, Joe, a CMU dropout, a Berkeley grad who was working at Yahoo, a snowboard apparel designer, and a santa clara grad. We hacked it out, and now that company is worth over a billion dollars. Joe was a Stanford graduate, the rest of us made it with equity. While at Addepar in SF I met Keith Rabois, who tried to recruit me to Square. I turned him down because I wanted to graduate school, but we became close friends and eventually started Opendoor together with Eric Wu, the child of immigrants who went to University of Arizona. We recruited a great team, and now Opendoor is a 10 billion dollar public company. There are a million and one privileges I've enjoyed, but they were mostly people being willing to bet on me. And most of the money I made was in equity. I never had a six figure salary until my last 6 months at Opendoor, and I didn't take any money off the table until year 5.
- farrarstan 5y ago
  lmao
- rgifford 5y ago
  I appreciate you sharing your story! It's cool to hear about your success and I definitely understand that it's different than some might think of it. Congrats! I'll try not criticize your narrative or how you frame it and focus on sharing how I think about mine instead. I'm American, white, male, and got into an American college. I studied economics in school, got super stressed about my debt and income inequality. So I came to SF after college, doubled down on my debt with a bootcamp, and got a high paying engineering job. It was a big, stressful risk and paid off. I paid all my student debt off in a few months. My life has been an absolute dream since. I would never, never in a million years say this: > ...our privilege mostly came from former underdogs choosing to bet on me From working with those guys at the moving company I can tell you, seemingly small missteps lead to irreversible stagnation in traditional measures of success (career, achievement, wealth, etc). Let's cast all that aside though and just focus on demographics. Americans represent ~4% of the world's population. About 32% of Americans have graduated college. ALREADY I'm part of ~1% of the world's population and we haven't even included white/male. And I bet you like what half of SF engineers and YC founders fall in that population? Just incredibly disproportionate. During the Great Depression stocks didn't rebound for 20 years. Over the last 20-40 years interest rates have steadily declined, ROI across the board has shrunk, and VC funds have proved highly profitable. All of that means that the last 20 years have been gangbusters for VC funding, SF, and software engineering. Had the next long protracted economic crisis hit during my job search, what would've happened? I was job searching for 6 months before I got my first job offer at a doctor's salary. What even is that!? I worked hard, I was lucky, and I was successful. I don't even pretend to understand the cause and effect there.
unishark 5y ago
> All their founders came from schools with less than 10% acceptance rates. This says they were overachievers in prior pursuits too. Universities may not do a perfect job of it, but their admissions is primarily based on merit. In fact the kind of person that will make a big impact on society is precisely what they look for in addition to grades and test scores. Perhaps they are just pretty good at it.
- farrarstan 5y ago
  lmao
- rgifford 5y ago
  Why are they overachievers though? What factors -- over which they had control -- formed their psychology, intellectual capability, access to resources and education? I'm guessing zip code predicts "overachiever-dom" depressingly well. I'm also guessing it's not everything, life is noisy.
  - hallway_monitor 5y ago
    A lot of people had access to those things and were not overachievers. Arguments like this stink of jealousy.
    - rgifford 5y ago
      Alright, Cardi B. This isn't about haters. Success has been compounding in fundamentally destructive patterns that are causing serious, unintended economic and societal consequences for 100 years now. If you're benefitting from that, great. I'm genuinely happy for you! But when it comes to policy making and interactions with others, holding onto a sense of personal exceptionalism hurts everyone. It also makes you look like an ass.
  - soheil 5y ago
    What difference does it make if there were factors they had control over? I suspect grit or tendency to work hard is primarily inherited just like intelligence. So you could also say anyone who works hard is not really doing so by their own doing. I’m not sure what exactly you feel victim of.
Aeolun 5y ago
> What if most of serious wealth and success is decided at birth? You don’t get to decide how much wealth you end up with. You do however decide how much you do not end up with.
Gatsky 5y ago
Note that everyone on this forum is prima facie remarkably privileged compared to someone in this world. 'We' all went to some kind of school as opposed to no school. 'We' all have amazing technology at our finger tips, as opposed to lacking basic nutrition and sanitation and personal safety. The difference between 'us' and the abject poor is much greater than the difference between 'us' and PG or Bill Gates. The abject poor can't even post on here to point this out. My point is that privilege tagging is hypocritical, and not useful. As such, I simply read this essay calmly for what it is, knowing that I too was born with more than enough luck. Yet I constantly fail to honour that most essential fact about my life.
- rgifford 5y ago
  It's an article called "How to Work Hard" that doesn't once mention luck, psychology, or basic human needs. What do you get from the success how-tos of multi-millionares? Do you really not see it as self-serving? Disclose survivorship bias, incredible privilege, and impossible odds and I'm in... I think? At that point I'm still unclear why the rich have something useful to say here that Maslow or other academics don't.
  - Gatsky 5y ago
    I've lost track of what your critique actually is. Anyway, I didn't read this essay because PG is rich. I do not in fact know if he is rich or not. His wealth neither increases nor decreases the likelihood that the essay is worthwile. I starting reading PG's essays because he made HN, which I find valuable, his net worth is irrelevant to me. I know about him because of HN, because of something he created, and for no other reason. I am able to contextualise his essay myself. It is not necessary for him to start the essay with a laundry list of disclaimers (eg I'm a neurotypical rich white guy with good parents, no major medical conditions, good teeth, 4 limbs etc).
  - nverno 5y ago
    A lot us are able to take pleasure in other people's success and try to learn from them. It isn't very useful to assume the worst about people. The generalizations you are making here about rich people, etc. etc. are honestly ridiculous. Some of the most generous people I've met were filthy rich.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
digislave 5y ago
Your story doesn't actually demonstrate that you have to know Warren Buffet as a child and attend an expensive school to become successful. I don't think anybody here claims that working hard automatically makes you successful, either, just that it is difficult to become successful without it. Also your movers could probably afford to work less if they dropped their drug habits.
Tycho 5y ago
Every time pg puts out a new essay, we get into this privilege bingo stuff. It’s always irrelevant. There’s a huge audience of people who don’t care if their CEO is 300x better paid than they are, or that they didn’t go to an elite school, or that they didn’t have prestigious family connections: what they want to know is how did he work, what can we do to unlock our productive potential, how can we create things that we can be proud of in the same way. That’s who Graham is writing for.
- TrackerFF 5y ago
  Maybe the way he worked is also a product of his environment, and could thus be dependent on things like wealth, family/genetics, upbringing, network, etc.?
  - Tycho 5y ago
    And those could also be good topics to explore. There’s room for different types of introspection and self-reflection. But from the perspective of how can we learn from or emulate or find proxies for the benefits of these other factors, not starting from the preposterous notion that Graham is writing self-serving screeds to hoodwink us.
willhslade 5y ago
I am not going to engage with most of this topic, nor am I disputing that Bill Gates had advantages most of the world didn't : mom on numerous boards, dad a successful lawyer, got into Harvard, etc. However, I will dispute that Warren Buffet knew Gates as a child. In a YouTube video Gates describes his first meeting, as an already wildly successful tech entrepreneur. https://youtu.be/VBIiy5CnTiY https://youtu.be/VBIiy5CnTiY
nverno 5y ago
Then we would be living in an alternate dystopian reality. Has privilege just come to be a catch-all to explain any difference in outcomes? I mean you mention Buffet first, kinda ruins the point you are making here. As a software engineer, I fail to see what is so impossible about any of the people's origin stories. With a little programming knowledge, a somewhat novel idea, and a laptop anyone could become the next Zuck. They aren't royalty, no special blood requirement anymore.

CheezeIt 5y ago

It isn’t, obviously, because look at the example of Bill Gates: starting a business as a 20-year-old college dropout puts you at a big disadvantage compared to people with more life experience.

j-krieger 5y ago
The difference being that gates was never in any real danger. His credits didn't disappear. He lived in a paid for apartment. He did not have to worry about money, and if he chose, he could've gone back to college at any time. It only puts you at a 'disadvantage' in business circles, because there's a slight chance that people with more experience will not take you as seriously
rgifford 5y ago
Take a look at the faces on the Forbes list and get back to me. Just how white, male and western are they exactly? It's not that Gates wasn't smart or hardworking. It's just that it's easy to be hardworking and ambitious when you had books growing up, proper nutrition, when your parents stayed together, when you're in good health, when you got tutors and went to great schools, when you were engaged in extracurriculars, when you lived in an affluent society, when your parents were well connected, and on and on and on. Are his contributions to humanity worth 60B+? Scientific discovery springs up in a bunch of places simultaneously and organically. I have to assume his contribution to society would've too, maybe with a smaller amount of value extracted to his personal fortune? He's a philanthropist now, so that's good. I would be too the way social and political tides are turning. Funny how philanthropic the wealthy become. Even Epstein.
- CheezeIt 5y ago
  Having good health, proper nutrition, and extracurriculars in an affluent society, i.e. having two parents who don’t suck, is a regular American baseline that public school kids experience. Gates’s particular advantages were being smart and having access to computers in high school in his day, which countered the bad luck of not being born a few years earlier such that he’d encounter computing in college with the same lead time before the 8086. Of course he found some great luck in business, too, well after the company was established and had employees on the payroll.
  - tolbish 5y ago
    > Gates’s particular advantages were being smart and having access to computers in high school in his day That's a rather inaccurate description of his advantages.
    - CheezeIt 5y ago
      If that’s inaccurate, tell us what gives us more bits of information distinguishing him from the general population born in the same year he is. The smart part puts him in the 0.1%, 10 bits right there, and early access to computers adds another rare multiplier to that.
RC_ITR 5y ago
The Bill Gates Mythology in this essay is a bit odd though. No doubt a hard worker, but the claim >"Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business in his era, but he was also among the hardest working. "I never took a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one." doesn't align with the facts that have recently emerged about him. [1] Maybe PG should examine selection bias and self-reporting bias a bit more before making the claim he does here. [1]https://nypost.com/2021/05/10/bill-gates-womanizer-held-nude-pool-parties-biographer/ https://nypost.com/2021/05/10/bill-gates-womanizer-held-nude...
- munificent 5y ago
  From the linked article: Another ex, Jill Bennett — described as his “first serious girlfriend” — said they split because of Gates’ fixation with working long hours. “In the end, it was difficult to sustain a relationship with someone who could boast a ‘seven-hour turnaround’ — meaning that from the time he left Microsoft to the time he returned in the morning was a mere seven hours,” she told Wallace. I don't see that being a "womanizer" is in any way incompatible with being a workaholic.
  - RC_ITR 5y ago
    Again. He claimed not a single day off, which is insanely unhealthy and almost certainly untrue if he had time for naked pool parties. I’m not claiming he was lazy, just asking “why take his provable lie at face value?”
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- conductr 5y ago
  I don’t see misalignment at all. I see complete irrelevance between that quote and the facts. Why can he not be a womanizing workaholic? They are not mutually exclusive and possibly actually correlated. Sex lives need to be private or at least not included as judgement of individual as they are not relevant at all to people’s accomplishments in politics, business, academics, or any other facet of an individual’s life.

ipnon 5y ago

Not all hardworking and talented people become successful, but all successful people are talented and hardworking. Some people are born with better chances than others, but we should strive to make a society where at least most people are born with a good chance.

rgifford 5y ago
> ...all successful people are talented and hardworking. I doubt it. Most measures of economic mobility show this is becoming less and less true -- if it ever was. I think believing it is important though.
- ipnon 5y ago
  Suppose someone is average and lazy. They're practically guaranteed to live a life of coasting by from job to job, living paycheck to paycheck, and struggling to get by in America these days. That is not success by my measure.
  - rgifford 5y ago
    What if that someone is average and lazy in their work to devote the rest of their time to their family? What if they raise a bunch of kids that love their parents, care about each other and the world and want to make it better? Would that be success? What if they were molested and use drugs to cope, but live their entire life without molesting anyone else? Would that be success? What if they have serious depression and they check out by playing video games, but they don't kill themselves? Would that be success? Holding up a few spectacular achievements as the paragon of human experience is fucking stupid. I genuinely think really rich (and smart) people do it to try to salve their guilt and signal for others.
    - ipnon 5y ago
      Yes, in general, but in the context of the original article success would be defined as higher education, well-paying job, able and healthy body, etc.

j-krieger 5y ago

> What if most of serious wealth and success is decided at birth? There is no 'what if'. It's just a fact. You can pretty accurately predict what a child will be able to attain in life by looking at their zip code.

emadabdulrahim 5y ago
While I'm not naive to not see that life is inherently unequal, I completely disagree with you. I know plenty people, including myself, who not only had the wrong zip code, they didn't even have a zip code. Somehow they made it. You can get lucky after you're born. And if you work hard, you can increase your luck odds. Also, why zip code is the axiom here? I'd say having good parents is more significant than being born in the right zip code. Who's to say?
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  Nobody's to say. For some reason some people think that statistics dictate reality when obviously they just take an average. The zip code thingy is silly, but on average more expensive zip codes produce children with higher incomes.
  - rgifford 5y ago
    Stats measure our shared experience. Is there something better for this? The human spirit isn't unconquerable. Believing it is has the side effect that you write off others because, "try harder." Vertasium did a fairly convincing bit on the zip code thing, which is -- I think -- why it's top of mind: https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I I encourage you to dig into economic data and not use your experience as a frame of reference for the economic reality of others.
    - thisismyswamp 5y ago
      Statistics wash away any hint of individuality
  - 5y ago

varispeed 5y ago

> Having an income 300:1 your lowest paid employee is disturbing I can imagine how and why communist revolutions were so "successful". This ratio simply shows theft from the workers. Probably, if we don't get a regulation in that area, so that let's say the maximum ratio could be no more than 10:1 and heavily tax capital gains, dividends and other means that privilege class use to extract value without having to work for it, this history will repeat itself. In some western countries, extreme left parties gain huge support, because people are simply fed up of reading that e.g. Amazon got another record year while they themselves have to sleep in a tent because they cannot afford paying rent.

ipnon 5y ago
The Russian communist revolution succeeded because Tsarist Russia was brutal and despotic, and the brutal and despotic Bolsheviks were merely the lesser of two evils and better fighters. The Chinese communist revolution succeeded because the Chinese Communist Party waged a guerilla war while the Nationalist army fought the Japanese invasion by themselves. Once the invasion was defeated the Chinese Communist Party fought a brutal conventional war marked by long sieges where 100,000s of city dwellers starved to death. I think political and military factors are underrated as explanations for the success of communist revolutions compared to social and economic factors.

KerrickStaley 5y ago

> Take a look at the top 10 highest valued YC startups. All their founders came from schools with less than 10% acceptance rates. This is not true. AirBnB is the top valued company that went through YC [1]. AirBnB was founded by Brian Chesky among others. Brian Chesky went to the Rhode Island School of Design [2]. The RISD had an acceptance rate of 20% in 2020. [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Chesky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Chesky [3] https://www.risd.edu/about https://www.risd.edu/about

easton 5y ago
I'm not going down the list because I don't have time at the moment, but #2 is DoorDash, and the two founders with Wikipedia pages went to Berkeley and Stanford. Both schools with lower acceptance rates.
j2kun 5y ago
Your point is not very well taken, because RISD is an extremely prestigious design school.

jdross 5y ago

I was a mover and then I ran a moving company. I love movers and the culture of people who work with their hands. They tend to be much funnier than office workers. I realize yours is a common reality, but it's not been my experience. I always felt surrounded by underdogs, and our privilege mostly came from former underdogs choosing to bet on me. My parents are middle class New Yorkers. I went to a public high school, ran track, skateboarded and played with computers and programming for fun. I went to Wash U in St Louis on financial scholarship. A great school but not the ones that tech companies recruit aggressively from. My freshman year I bootstrapped a moving company and a custom apparel company, and I worked constantly at both on top of a full course load for a double major and social obligations. I probably couldn't do that today, but it didn't feel like work then. It was fun. Both of those companies did well enough that I got introduced to Joe Lonsdale as he was starting Addepar, and I made enough money from them to pay off all debts and enter adult life with over 150k in savings. I joined Addepar my sophomore summer. It was me, Joe, a CMU dropout, a Berkeley grad who was working at Yahoo, a snowboard apparel designer, and a santa clara grad. We hacked it out, and now that company is worth over a billion dollars. Joe was a Stanford graduate, the rest of us made it with equity. While at Addepar in SF I met Keith Rabois, who tried to recruit me to Square. I turned him down because I wanted to graduate school, but we became close friends and eventually started Opendoor together with Eric Wu, the child of immigrants who went to University of Arizona. We recruited a great team, and now Opendoor is a 10 billion dollar public company. There are a million and one privileges I've enjoyed, but they were mostly people being willing to bet on me. And most of the money I made was in equity. I never had a six figure salary until my last 6 months at Opendoor, and I didn't take any money off the table until year 5.

farrarstan 5y ago
lmao
rgifford 5y ago
I appreciate you sharing your story! It's cool to hear about your success and I definitely understand that it's different than some might think of it. Congrats! I'll try not criticize your narrative or how you frame it and focus on sharing how I think about mine instead. I'm American, white, male, and got into an American college. I studied economics in school, got super stressed about my debt and income inequality. So I came to SF after college, doubled down on my debt with a bootcamp, and got a high paying engineering job. It was a big, stressful risk and paid off. I paid all my student debt off in a few months. My life has been an absolute dream since. I would never, never in a million years say this: > ...our privilege mostly came from former underdogs choosing to bet on me From working with those guys at the moving company I can tell you, seemingly small missteps lead to irreversible stagnation in traditional measures of success (career, achievement, wealth, etc). Let's cast all that aside though and just focus on demographics. Americans represent ~4% of the world's population. About 32% of Americans have graduated college. ALREADY I'm part of ~1% of the world's population and we haven't even included white/male. And I bet you like what half of SF engineers and YC founders fall in that population? Just incredibly disproportionate. During the Great Depression stocks didn't rebound for 20 years. Over the last 20-40 years interest rates have steadily declined, ROI across the board has shrunk, and VC funds have proved highly profitable. All of that means that the last 20 years have been gangbusters for VC funding, SF, and software engineering. Had the next long protracted economic crisis hit during my job search, what would've happened? I was job searching for 6 months before I got my first job offer at a doctor's salary. What even is that!? I worked hard, I was lucky, and I was successful. I don't even pretend to understand the cause and effect there.

unishark 5y ago

> All their founders came from schools with less than 10% acceptance rates. This says they were overachievers in prior pursuits too. Universities may not do a perfect job of it, but their admissions is primarily based on merit. In fact the kind of person that will make a big impact on society is precisely what they look for in addition to grades and test scores. Perhaps they are just pretty good at it.

farrarstan 5y ago
lmao
rgifford 5y ago
Why are they overachievers though? What factors -- over which they had control -- formed their psychology, intellectual capability, access to resources and education? I'm guessing zip code predicts "overachiever-dom" depressingly well. I'm also guessing it's not everything, life is noisy.
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  A lot of people had access to those things and were not overachievers. Arguments like this stink of jealousy.
  - rgifford 5y ago
    Alright, Cardi B. This isn't about haters. Success has been compounding in fundamentally destructive patterns that are causing serious, unintended economic and societal consequences for 100 years now. If you're benefitting from that, great. I'm genuinely happy for you! But when it comes to policy making and interactions with others, holding onto a sense of personal exceptionalism hurts everyone. It also makes you look like an ass.
- soheil 5y ago
  What difference does it make if there were factors they had control over? I suspect grit or tendency to work hard is primarily inherited just like intelligence. So you could also say anyone who works hard is not really doing so by their own doing. I’m not sure what exactly you feel victim of.

Aeolun 5y ago

> What if most of serious wealth and success is decided at birth? You don’t get to decide how much wealth you end up with. You do however decide how much you do not end up with.

Gatsky 5y ago

Note that everyone on this forum is prima facie remarkably privileged compared to someone in this world. 'We' all went to some kind of school as opposed to no school. 'We' all have amazing technology at our finger tips, as opposed to lacking basic nutrition and sanitation and personal safety. The difference between 'us' and the abject poor is much greater than the difference between 'us' and PG or Bill Gates. The abject poor can't even post on here to point this out. My point is that privilege tagging is hypocritical, and not useful. As such, I simply read this essay calmly for what it is, knowing that I too was born with more than enough luck. Yet I constantly fail to honour that most essential fact about my life.

rgifford 5y ago
It's an article called "How to Work Hard" that doesn't once mention luck, psychology, or basic human needs. What do you get from the success how-tos of multi-millionares? Do you really not see it as self-serving? Disclose survivorship bias, incredible privilege, and impossible odds and I'm in... I think? At that point I'm still unclear why the rich have something useful to say here that Maslow or other academics don't.
- Gatsky 5y ago
  I've lost track of what your critique actually is. Anyway, I didn't read this essay because PG is rich. I do not in fact know if he is rich or not. His wealth neither increases nor decreases the likelihood that the essay is worthwile. I starting reading PG's essays because he made HN, which I find valuable, his net worth is irrelevant to me. I know about him because of HN, because of something he created, and for no other reason. I am able to contextualise his essay myself. It is not necessary for him to start the essay with a laundry list of disclaimers (eg I'm a neurotypical rich white guy with good parents, no major medical conditions, good teeth, 4 limbs etc).
- nverno 5y ago
  A lot us are able to take pleasure in other people's success and try to learn from them. It isn't very useful to assume the worst about people. The generalizations you are making here about rich people, etc. etc. are honestly ridiculous. Some of the most generous people I've met were filthy rich.

deleted 5y ago

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digislave 5y ago

Your story doesn't actually demonstrate that you have to know Warren Buffet as a child and attend an expensive school to become successful. I don't think anybody here claims that working hard automatically makes you successful, either, just that it is difficult to become successful without it. Also your movers could probably afford to work less if they dropped their drug habits.

Tycho 5y ago

Every time pg puts out a new essay, we get into this privilege bingo stuff. It’s always irrelevant. There’s a huge audience of people who don’t care if their CEO is 300x better paid than they are, or that they didn’t go to an elite school, or that they didn’t have prestigious family connections: what they want to know is how did he work, what can we do to unlock our productive potential, how can we create things that we can be proud of in the same way. That’s who Graham is writing for.

TrackerFF 5y ago
Maybe the way he worked is also a product of his environment, and could thus be dependent on things like wealth, family/genetics, upbringing, network, etc.?
- Tycho 5y ago
  And those could also be good topics to explore. There’s room for different types of introspection and self-reflection. But from the perspective of how can we learn from or emulate or find proxies for the benefits of these other factors, not starting from the preposterous notion that Graham is writing self-serving screeds to hoodwink us.

willhslade 5y ago

I am not going to engage with most of this topic, nor am I disputing that Bill Gates had advantages most of the world didn't : mom on numerous boards, dad a successful lawyer, got into Harvard, etc. However, I will dispute that Warren Buffet knew Gates as a child. In a YouTube video Gates describes his first meeting, as an already wildly successful tech entrepreneur. https://youtu.be/VBIiy5CnTiY https://youtu.be/VBIiy5CnTiY

nverno 5y ago

Then we would be living in an alternate dystopian reality. Has privilege just come to be a catch-all to explain any difference in outcomes? I mean you mention Buffet first, kinda ruins the point you are making here. As a software engineer, I fail to see what is so impossible about any of the people's origin stories. With a little programming knowledge, a somewhat novel idea, and a laptop anyone could become the next Zuck. They aren't royalty, no special blood requirement anymore.