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This is stupid. Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. What’s your ideal of being successful

This is stupid. Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success. The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff. 1. have a good team and hire right. you need just three roles: sales, operation and product. 2. TAM is real and will determine the size you can grow your business. 3. focus on sales first literally. as a founder you should do your own selling. take care of your customers!!! 4. don’t be a crook 5. manage your money right; be cheap. 6. grow where you’re planted. dig deep in areas you know or that your personal networks know. 7. be lucky - this is about timing and also putting yourself in a place to have information first or at least know the value of certain information first. 8. know you’re going to get it wrong sometime and fail; when that happens take a small break and then spin up another I’ve bootstrapped two companies to success in my eyes which has changed me and my families life. The first was in the 2000s out of college (~$500k annual) it eventually petered out then in the 2010s (~$5m annual). Now I’m going to do another and I hope to create a $5-10m company all off the advice of other entrepreneurs. I’ve also failed miserably and had 5-7 business go under or never even really get off the ground.

altdataseller 4y ago
What was the revenue of the 2nd bootstrapped success?
- mkl 4y ago
  I think they mean it was $5 million. The same sentence seems to be talking about both of them, but would be clearer broken into two before "then". I'm interpreting it as "The first was in the 2000s out of college (~$500k annual); it eventually petered out. Then [the second was] in the 2010s (~$5m annual)."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rhaway84773 4y ago
While I don’t agree with the premise of the tweet, having created 2 successful businesses doesn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t all luck, because you’re missing the fact that the number of entrepreneurs, who would be the equivalent of the lottery contestants, is highly limited. If you had a daily lottery but only 1000 people were able to enter it, by year 5 nearly everyone would have won the lottery at least twice.
oxfordmale 4y ago
You can do all of this and still fail. Many well-run start-ups fail because of market conditions. There is a lot of luck involved.
bluefirebrand 4y ago
Honestly it just looks to me like the lottery you won is not "having a successful business", but "having the luxury and connections to try and fail 5-7 times with one success" Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.
- loudandskittish 4y ago
  Yeah, this is one of the things that drives me nuts about these "inspirational" stories where some millionaire/billionaire talks proudly about how their first business failed, their car was repo'd, bank foreclosed on them, etc... but I've never heard one talk about what they did between that and the successful business. Where did they sleep? How did they afford food?
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Varies but mostly you go get a job for a while.
    - dieselgate 4y ago
      Indeed. I’m not an entrepreneur or anything but liken it a bit to having a good initial poker hand - you can win with one good card but it is helpful and gives one more options to have two good cards. So in the context of bootstrapping a company it’s helpful to have a legit fallback (way to suck it up and find an OK job) when things don’t pan out. Edit: maybe this is obvious for CS/software folks but the extracurricular work I’m involved with is not exactly tech related, though my day job is coding
    - moralestapia 4y ago
      The secret is that sometimes you just have to ... sigh ... work.
      - jollofricepeas 4y ago
        Of course. We work jobs and do our thing on the side like most traditional American entrepreneurs do until their business gets off the ground. Who the hell is bootstrapping businesses without a job besides rich kids? 1. Get a cheap apartment in a slightly sketchy neighborhood 2. Work 7-8 hours at work and every other waking hour on your business. Take meetings during lunch. 3. Focus to the point of cutting out sports, video games, bars and other frivolous shit until you’ve made progress. Don’t date if you can. Discipline wins the race. And when you fail; which you will. Do it all over again until you find success.
bsder 4y ago
You are precisely demonstrating the original post, no? You had 2 of 9 businesses succeed. You are demonstrating roughly 1:5 odds of rolling a successful business. With 1:5 odds if we reroll you doing 10 businesses over and over, 10% of you never succeed. About 1/3 of you win once, 1/3 of you win twice, and 20% of you win 3 times. The versions of you that won 3 times are not any different than the versions of you who won never. Any advice you give is neither more accurate because a version of you won 3 times nor less accurate because a version of you won never.
- kjksf 4y ago
  Those are not the odds, just his success rate. If you do everything badly (i.e. come up with bad business ides, cannot implement even those bad ideas, are bad at hiring, managing money, paying taxes etc.) then your success rate will be 0%, not 20%. The issue here isn't about how hard starting a business is. It's obviously hard enough that many (most?) people who try will fail. The issue is: can you do things better? Is doing things better lead to higher probability of success? The "it's all luck" people say that you can't. There is no better or worse way. It's just luck. Therefore any advice is useless. The opposite point of view is: yes. There are better and worse ways of doing things. And if you know what they are then you can tell other people. And that advice will help them to achieve success. But not guarantee.
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    I think one of the main problems is that for a lot of people, starting a business basically has a 0% chance of success. Some people may be able to increase their chances, but maybe not everyone.
  - fountainofage 4y ago
    "but not guarantee" is almost the entire point of what folks are pointing out and what the OP meant - you could do literally everything perfect and still it's VERY likely you will fail.
trimbo 4y ago
I agree that measure of success is relative and like the principles you list, but your reply lands reinforcing the point of the tweet. Does 2 out of 9 successful startups mean your tenets listed here will lead to your level of success 22% of the time? Or do they only lead to success 0.022% of the time and you're the 1 out of 5000? How do you know? It's not just this topic, it's a problem with general advice humans give to other humans without applying any specific context.
boca_honey 4y ago
You won the lottery in the sense that you went to college, live in a well-off english speaking country and as such, can burn through 5-7 failures. I'm sure you're smart and hard working, and I don't believe in shaming gringos as if being born rich (e.g. having access to a toilet and clean water) was their own fault. You deserve to be happy with what you have. But will never get to be preachy about it without some one calling you out, unless you surround yourself with people with the same biases.
- vanviegen 4y ago
  You're making a lot of assumptions.
  - gnulinux 4y ago
    No they're not. Just the self-admitted fact that they could afford to fail 5-7 times creating a business shows that they had more social and financial safety net than an average American. Most Americans can't just create a business, fail, and repeat it 4-6 more times.
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      [1] is interesting - suggests that 32% of American adults getting a surprise $400 bill would require them to borrow, sell something, or be unable to pay it. Which is quite the statistic when you think about it. [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2022-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2021-dealing-with-unexpected-expenses.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2022-economic-we...
    - vanviegen 4y ago
      Do we know that these failures weren't after (and paid for by) the first succes?
- itronitron 4y ago
  Most gringos can not burn through a single failure, let alone 5-7. This helps to explain why the US Military is as large as it is...
asah 4y ago
+1. I have 3 IPOs and numerous acquisitions, across multiple industries. It's still 50/50 but that's way better than the long odds most people face. Also agree that it depends on your goals! I've done venture capital deals, self funded deals ("lifestyle"), non-profit & political campaigns, etc - and different stages and goals. Obviously YMMV: I know people who legit get lucky and then their luck runs out, and I know smart guys who do everything right and can't catch a break. It's also fun to angel invest. Get to see dozens more companies from (a bit) of the inside.
- eddsh1994 4y ago
  Did you found those IPOs and acquisition startups? That’s very impressive if so!
  - asah 4y ago
    thanks. I was very early, but not a founder of the IPOs. If you have access to dealflow and add value (e.g. as staff, investor or adviser), then it's much easier to "pick winners" and let others take the bigger risks and enjoy the billionaire lifestyle. By valley standards, I'm a small but respected player.
    - eddsh1994 4y ago
      Could you explain this a little more? I've worked in early stage startups for almost eight years and had 1 minor acquisition where I got barely anything. I'd love to look into this 'targeted approach' you mention.
designium 4y ago
What’s TAM?
- sveme 4y ago
  Total Addressable Market.
- maxilevi 4y ago
  Total addressable market
- scarface74 4y ago
  Or “the $x market is one quadrillion dollars if we just capture 1% the company will be worth billions” - or the first slide of the pitch deck of every startup seeking venture capital.
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  It’s a WAG
epgui 4y ago
Michael Sandel’s “meritocracy trap”, exhibit A.
ericmcer 4y ago
Yeah that is why he said it is a bit of a lottery. 2 of 9 seems like a pretty solid success rate but that means even you (someone who has a knack for it) would need 4 solid efforts to have good odds at getting a winner. 4 failed attempts is going to burn most people out emotionally if not financially. Was your first successful business one of your first ones? What if it had taken you until your 6th try to get a winner? Would you have stuck it out?
layer8 4y ago
The tweet is a hyperbole, but it points at the important role of luck and survivorship bias. It is clear that given the dimensions of skill and luck, the most success will come from having both. If you lack either skill or luck, you will automatically be at a disadvantage compared to those who have both. This implies that the most prominent success stories are the result of luck as much as of anything else. However that isn’t very often mentioned in those stories.
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
You are rightfully being pilloried. At age 40+ you really need to have more wisdom.
JamesBarney 4y ago
Another lesson is 9. If when you pitch your original idea to potential customers, if they're not over the moon about it your destined for failure.
nullsense 4y ago
>7. be lucky You have to make absolute certain that you remember to do this step and to do it correctly, as well as at the right time, or it won't work.
m3kw9 4y ago
Luck is involved in everything because whatever you have decided, it’s not a sure shot of winning. The decision to make the product a certain way for example, or certain timing, marketing spend etc and all of them matter
- scarface74 4y ago
  The chance of the average CS grad - well at least until this year - of being able to “grind leetcode and working for a FAANG” (c) r/cscareerquestions and ending up with over 1 million dollars of before tax “profits” in four years is much greater than your average “startup founder” that’s not even counting the risk premium. And yes I’m far away from a new college grad.
  - m3kw9 4y ago
    Yeah, first finding out this is a way to game the software engineer hiring system and having the believe to go “all in” and try if one of the company’s stupid enough to hire mostly based on that fact
    - scarface74 4y ago
      You realize that is the way to get in all of the best paying companies as a software engineer? No I didn’t do it. But I have 25 years of experience in the industry and was able to get a remote role via a slight pivot.
d23 4y ago
> 7. be lucky
- dougSF70 4y ago
  Yes, don't forget to be lucky. And don't forget to rewrite history once your idea is a success. If its a failure, its someone else's fault.
gnulinux 4y ago
What a heartbreaking comment to read: > Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. > I’ve also failed miserably and had 5-7 business go under or never even really get off the ground. This means that you incurred (2+) / ((2+) + (5-7)) chance of creating a successful business. This is in the spirit of the OP. Creating a business may involve some skill, but ultimately it's just a lottery. Sometimes you win only because you're lucky. Or something you lose only because you're unlucky. I apologize but I truly do think giving advise like this can be dangerous. Not everyone is as privileged and maybe a single failure can put them in life-long debt, or financial trouble, or homelessness.
- shon 4y ago
  I disagree. I’ve also failed multiple times but achieved what for me is a satisfying level of success in the process. As a ratio I’ve failed a lot more than I’ve won but it is not a lottery. It’s more like a golf game, it’s hard to do well but you do learn and improve with each attempt.
  - harshalizee 4y ago
    That's exactly the lottery. The fact that you can play multiple rounds of "golf" is the privilege that the OP is talking about. You are lucky enough to be able to afford buying multiple lottery tickets and some hit the jackpot. Most people will never even have the opportunity to afford one lottery ticket.
    - shon 4y ago
      Then life, not business is the lottery. The lottery idea works in the sense that I was born in the U.S. rather than a developing country AND my parents, who were far from rich or even stable at times still were able to afford a family computer (thank you Atari 520ST) which was very fortunate since my formal education ended the 3rd time I was expelled from high school. Yes, from the life perspective, as opposed to a worst-case (even in the U.S) I most certainly am privileged and lucky, and did certainly win a lottery of sorts. You’re absolutely correct. Having said that, most of us that work in tech have won that same or a similar lottery. Life, location, family, stability, yes those things are a bit of a lottery. But not so for startups. Your odds of winning the lottery never increase. Your odds of winning in business do, as long as you learn from your failures.
wpietri 4y ago
That there are successful entrepreneurs, or that some of them may give good advice, doesn't mean that he doesn't have a valid point about entrepreneurial advice as a genre. I think there are three keys to the problem: 1) readers want feel-good success stories, 2) successful people strongly benefit from positive PR, and 3) people often can't usefully talk about why they succeeded. The first, I think, is pretty obvious. The Hero's Journey long predates modern capitalism, but it very much gets applied. On top of that, add that readers want to feel positive, powerful, smart, enabled. So you can't just tell them, "Sure, you'd like to be rich like this guy, but take it from me, you're fucked from the get-go." There's a good critique of the corporate bio that relates: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/02/11/jeff-john-roberts-kings-of-crypto-the-heros-journey-of-coinbase/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/02/11/jeff-john-ro... The second bit means that business heroes are not going to tell you, here's my secret: be born at least moderately wealthy and well connected. They aren't going to tell you that past a certain levehttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-alll https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-... of wealth, it's basically impossible to go broke. They're instead going to make themselves seem both extraordinary and extra ordinary. See, e.g.: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-... And the third is something I'm sure many here have experienced. I started coding as a child, the son of a software developer. When people ask me how to get started as a developer, the honest answer is: I have no fucking idea. I have little recollection of how I learned, and I have no idea whether the parts that were easy for me would be easy for anybody else. I'll be positive and encouraging and give vague general advice. But if I talked about what worked for me, it would be very much in the vein of "here's the lottery ticket number I used", because my path was so personal.
- physicles 4y ago
  The third one resonates. As someone who also started coding at a young age, here’s what worked for me: 1. Have at least 10 free hours each week, 2. Get fanatically addicted to coding, 3. Repeat for 8 years and then do a four year CS degree. Pretty useless advice. Apropos the article, it’s easy to imagine there’s a similar lottery for most paths in life, including entrepreneurship. “Be born rich enough that you have the innate confidence that the universe will bend to your will” is a lottery I didn’t win. Surely, a kernel of the current political polarization is the left’s insistence that these lottery tickets matter, and the right’s insistence that the wealth they’re holding is the result of their own hard work. (To be clear, it’s a spectrum — tickets come in different sizes, and hard work plays a role — but such nuance has no place in public discourse)
bradleyjg 4y ago
I’ve bootstrapped two companies to success in my eyes which has changed me and my families life. … I’ve also failed miserably and had 5-7 business go under or never even really get off the ground. All other things being equal, I’d expect someone who started 8 businesses and had one mild and one moderate success to have more useful insights to offer than someone who started one business and had it become wildly successful. Yet our culture valorizes the latter to extreme extents. Perhaps that was what “awinkinson” was trying to get at with his pithy comment on that terrible platform.
roflyear 4y ago
The point is you still got lucky. Something helped you beyond doing hard work.
gcanyon 4y ago
All of that seems very "necessary but not sufficient." The fact you had multiple businesses fail seems strongly to argue for that: presumably you didn't violate any of the above points when you failed?
dan-robertson 4y ago
I think it’s probably right that some people are better at running successful startups than others. They might be more willing to try / fail, have better ideas, etc, and it isn’t just stuff like having good connections to funding. I think it could still be true that the advice isn’t very good but not for the reason the tweet gives (I agree the tweet is stupid). In particular, I think there could be a lot of tacit things that aren’t really expressed in advice, especially the ‘startup influencer’ types who give out advice on twitter. For example, it might be that being really good at hiring and having people work on the right thing is a key skill and a successful founder might think they just walked around the office and asked obvious questions without being able to write down what exactly it was they did to steer the company in the right direction.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Unless your startup was profitable before you sold it, it could just as well be luck and connections and not skill. It takes a lot more skill to run a “profitable” business. I wander how many of those “successful” startups will be successful when they can’t spend years living off of VC funding?

altdataseller 4y ago

What was the revenue of the 2nd bootstrapped success?

mkl 4y ago
I think they mean it was $5 million. The same sentence seems to be talking about both of them, but would be clearer broken into two before "then". I'm interpreting it as "The first was in the 2000s out of college (~$500k annual); it eventually petered out. Then [the second was] in the 2010s (~$5m annual)."

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rhaway84773 4y ago

While I don’t agree with the premise of the tweet, having created 2 successful businesses doesn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t all luck, because you’re missing the fact that the number of entrepreneurs, who would be the equivalent of the lottery contestants, is highly limited. If you had a daily lottery but only 1000 people were able to enter it, by year 5 nearly everyone would have won the lottery at least twice.

oxfordmale 4y ago

You can do all of this and still fail. Many well-run start-ups fail because of market conditions. There is a lot of luck involved.

bluefirebrand 4y ago

Honestly it just looks to me like the lottery you won is not "having a successful business", but "having the luxury and connections to try and fail 5-7 times with one success" Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.

loudandskittish 4y ago
Yeah, this is one of the things that drives me nuts about these "inspirational" stories where some millionaire/billionaire talks proudly about how their first business failed, their car was repo'd, bank foreclosed on them, etc... but I've never heard one talk about what they did between that and the successful business. Where did they sleep? How did they afford food?
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Varies but mostly you go get a job for a while.
  - dieselgate 4y ago
    Indeed. I’m not an entrepreneur or anything but liken it a bit to having a good initial poker hand - you can win with one good card but it is helpful and gives one more options to have two good cards. So in the context of bootstrapping a company it’s helpful to have a legit fallback (way to suck it up and find an OK job) when things don’t pan out. Edit: maybe this is obvious for CS/software folks but the extracurricular work I’m involved with is not exactly tech related, though my day job is coding
  - moralestapia 4y ago
    The secret is that sometimes you just have to ... sigh ... work.
    - jollofricepeas 4y ago
      Of course. We work jobs and do our thing on the side like most traditional American entrepreneurs do until their business gets off the ground. Who the hell is bootstrapping businesses without a job besides rich kids? 1. Get a cheap apartment in a slightly sketchy neighborhood 2. Work 7-8 hours at work and every other waking hour on your business. Take meetings during lunch. 3. Focus to the point of cutting out sports, video games, bars and other frivolous shit until you’ve made progress. Don’t date if you can. Discipline wins the race. And when you fail; which you will. Do it all over again until you find success.

bsder 4y ago

You are precisely demonstrating the original post, no? You had 2 of 9 businesses succeed. You are demonstrating roughly 1:5 odds of rolling a successful business. With 1:5 odds if we reroll you doing 10 businesses over and over, 10% of you never succeed. About 1/3 of you win once, 1/3 of you win twice, and 20% of you win 3 times. The versions of you that won 3 times are not any different than the versions of you who won never. Any advice you give is neither more accurate because a version of you won 3 times nor less accurate because a version of you won never.

kjksf 4y ago
Those are not the odds, just his success rate. If you do everything badly (i.e. come up with bad business ides, cannot implement even those bad ideas, are bad at hiring, managing money, paying taxes etc.) then your success rate will be 0%, not 20%. The issue here isn't about how hard starting a business is. It's obviously hard enough that many (most?) people who try will fail. The issue is: can you do things better? Is doing things better lead to higher probability of success? The "it's all luck" people say that you can't. There is no better or worse way. It's just luck. Therefore any advice is useless. The opposite point of view is: yes. There are better and worse ways of doing things. And if you know what they are then you can tell other people. And that advice will help them to achieve success. But not guarantee.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  I think one of the main problems is that for a lot of people, starting a business basically has a 0% chance of success. Some people may be able to increase their chances, but maybe not everyone.
- fountainofage 4y ago
  "but not guarantee" is almost the entire point of what folks are pointing out and what the OP meant - you could do literally everything perfect and still it's VERY likely you will fail.

trimbo 4y ago

I agree that measure of success is relative and like the principles you list, but your reply lands reinforcing the point of the tweet. Does 2 out of 9 successful startups mean your tenets listed here will lead to your level of success 22% of the time? Or do they only lead to success 0.022% of the time and you're the 1 out of 5000? How do you know? It's not just this topic, it's a problem with general advice humans give to other humans without applying any specific context.

boca_honey 4y ago

You won the lottery in the sense that you went to college, live in a well-off english speaking country and as such, can burn through 5-7 failures. I'm sure you're smart and hard working, and I don't believe in shaming gringos as if being born rich (e.g. having access to a toilet and clean water) was their own fault. You deserve to be happy with what you have. But will never get to be preachy about it without some one calling you out, unless you surround yourself with people with the same biases.

vanviegen 4y ago
You're making a lot of assumptions.
- gnulinux 4y ago
  No they're not. Just the self-admitted fact that they could afford to fail 5-7 times creating a business shows that they had more social and financial safety net than an average American. Most Americans can't just create a business, fail, and repeat it 4-6 more times.
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    [1] is interesting - suggests that 32% of American adults getting a surprise $400 bill would require them to borrow, sell something, or be unable to pay it. Which is quite the statistic when you think about it. [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2022-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2021-dealing-with-unexpected-expenses.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2022-economic-we...
  - vanviegen 4y ago
    Do we know that these failures weren't after (and paid for by) the first succes?
itronitron 4y ago
Most gringos can not burn through a single failure, let alone 5-7. This helps to explain why the US Military is as large as it is...

asah 4y ago

+1. I have 3 IPOs and numerous acquisitions, across multiple industries. It's still 50/50 but that's way better than the long odds most people face. Also agree that it depends on your goals! I've done venture capital deals, self funded deals ("lifestyle"), non-profit & political campaigns, etc - and different stages and goals. Obviously YMMV: I know people who legit get lucky and then their luck runs out, and I know smart guys who do everything right and can't catch a break. It's also fun to angel invest. Get to see dozens more companies from (a bit) of the inside.

eddsh1994 4y ago
Did you found those IPOs and acquisition startups? That’s very impressive if so!
- asah 4y ago
  thanks. I was very early, but not a founder of the IPOs. If you have access to dealflow and add value (e.g. as staff, investor or adviser), then it's much easier to "pick winners" and let others take the bigger risks and enjoy the billionaire lifestyle. By valley standards, I'm a small but respected player.
  - eddsh1994 4y ago
    Could you explain this a little more? I've worked in early stage startups for almost eight years and had 1 minor acquisition where I got barely anything. I'd love to look into this 'targeted approach' you mention.

designium 4y ago

What’s TAM?

sveme 4y ago
Total Addressable Market.
maxilevi 4y ago
Total addressable market
scarface74 4y ago
Or “the $x market is one quadrillion dollars if we just capture 1% the company will be worth billions” - or the first slide of the pitch deck of every startup seeking venture capital.
berniedurfee 4y ago
It’s a WAG

epgui 4y ago

Michael Sandel’s “meritocracy trap”, exhibit A.

ericmcer 4y ago

Yeah that is why he said it is a bit of a lottery. 2 of 9 seems like a pretty solid success rate but that means even you (someone who has a knack for it) would need 4 solid efforts to have good odds at getting a winner. 4 failed attempts is going to burn most people out emotionally if not financially. Was your first successful business one of your first ones? What if it had taken you until your 6th try to get a winner? Would you have stuck it out?

layer8 4y ago

The tweet is a hyperbole, but it points at the important role of luck and survivorship bias. It is clear that given the dimensions of skill and luck, the most success will come from having both. If you lack either skill or luck, you will automatically be at a disadvantage compared to those who have both. This implies that the most prominent success stories are the result of luck as much as of anything else. However that isn’t very often mentioned in those stories.

dennis_jeeves1 4y ago

You are rightfully being pilloried. At age 40+ you really need to have more wisdom.

JamesBarney 4y ago

Another lesson is 9. If when you pitch your original idea to potential customers, if they're not over the moon about it your destined for failure.

nullsense 4y ago

>7. be lucky You have to make absolute certain that you remember to do this step and to do it correctly, as well as at the right time, or it won't work.

m3kw9 4y ago

Luck is involved in everything because whatever you have decided, it’s not a sure shot of winning. The decision to make the product a certain way for example, or certain timing, marketing spend etc and all of them matter

scarface74 4y ago
The chance of the average CS grad - well at least until this year - of being able to “grind leetcode and working for a FAANG” (c) r/cscareerquestions and ending up with over 1 million dollars of before tax “profits” in four years is much greater than your average “startup founder” that’s not even counting the risk premium. And yes I’m far away from a new college grad.
- m3kw9 4y ago
  Yeah, first finding out this is a way to game the software engineer hiring system and having the believe to go “all in” and try if one of the company’s stupid enough to hire mostly based on that fact
  - scarface74 4y ago
    You realize that is the way to get in all of the best paying companies as a software engineer? No I didn’t do it. But I have 25 years of experience in the industry and was able to get a remote role via a slight pivot.

d23 4y ago

> 7. be lucky

dougSF70 4y ago
Yes, don't forget to be lucky. And don't forget to rewrite history once your idea is a success. If its a failure, its someone else's fault.

gnulinux 4y ago

What a heartbreaking comment to read: > Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. > I’ve also failed miserably and had 5-7 business go under or never even really get off the ground. This means that you incurred (2+) / ((2+) + (5-7)) chance of creating a successful business. This is in the spirit of the OP. Creating a business may involve some skill, but ultimately it's just a lottery. Sometimes you win only because you're lucky. Or something you lose only because you're unlucky. I apologize but I truly do think giving advise like this can be dangerous. Not everyone is as privileged and maybe a single failure can put them in life-long debt, or financial trouble, or homelessness.

shon 4y ago
I disagree. I’ve also failed multiple times but achieved what for me is a satisfying level of success in the process. As a ratio I’ve failed a lot more than I’ve won but it is not a lottery. It’s more like a golf game, it’s hard to do well but you do learn and improve with each attempt.
- harshalizee 4y ago
  That's exactly the lottery. The fact that you can play multiple rounds of "golf" is the privilege that the OP is talking about. You are lucky enough to be able to afford buying multiple lottery tickets and some hit the jackpot. Most people will never even have the opportunity to afford one lottery ticket.
  - shon 4y ago
    Then life, not business is the lottery. The lottery idea works in the sense that I was born in the U.S. rather than a developing country AND my parents, who were far from rich or even stable at times still were able to afford a family computer (thank you Atari 520ST) which was very fortunate since my formal education ended the 3rd time I was expelled from high school. Yes, from the life perspective, as opposed to a worst-case (even in the U.S) I most certainly am privileged and lucky, and did certainly win a lottery of sorts. You’re absolutely correct. Having said that, most of us that work in tech have won that same or a similar lottery. Life, location, family, stability, yes those things are a bit of a lottery. But not so for startups. Your odds of winning the lottery never increase. Your odds of winning in business do, as long as you learn from your failures.

wpietri 4y ago

That there are successful entrepreneurs, or that some of them may give good advice, doesn't mean that he doesn't have a valid point about entrepreneurial advice as a genre. I think there are three keys to the problem: 1) readers want feel-good success stories, 2) successful people strongly benefit from positive PR, and 3) people often can't usefully talk about why they succeeded. The first, I think, is pretty obvious. The Hero's Journey long predates modern capitalism, but it very much gets applied. On top of that, add that readers want to feel positive, powerful, smart, enabled. So you can't just tell them, "Sure, you'd like to be rich like this guy, but take it from me, you're fucked from the get-go." There's a good critique of the corporate bio that relates: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/02/11/jeff-john-roberts-kings-of-crypto-the-heros-journey-of-coinbase/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/02/11/jeff-john-ro... The second bit means that business heroes are not going to tell you, here's my secret: be born at least moderately wealthy and well connected. They aren't going to tell you that past a certain levehttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-alll https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-... of wealth, it's basically impossible to go broke. They're instead going to make themselves seem both extraordinary and extra ordinary. See, e.g.: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-... And the third is something I'm sure many here have experienced. I started coding as a child, the son of a software developer. When people ask me how to get started as a developer, the honest answer is: I have no fucking idea. I have little recollection of how I learned, and I have no idea whether the parts that were easy for me would be easy for anybody else. I'll be positive and encouraging and give vague general advice. But if I talked about what worked for me, it would be very much in the vein of "here's the lottery ticket number I used", because my path was so personal.

physicles 4y ago
The third one resonates. As someone who also started coding at a young age, here’s what worked for me: 1. Have at least 10 free hours each week, 2. Get fanatically addicted to coding, 3. Repeat for 8 years and then do a four year CS degree. Pretty useless advice. Apropos the article, it’s easy to imagine there’s a similar lottery for most paths in life, including entrepreneurship. “Be born rich enough that you have the innate confidence that the universe will bend to your will” is a lottery I didn’t win. Surely, a kernel of the current political polarization is the left’s insistence that these lottery tickets matter, and the right’s insistence that the wealth they’re holding is the result of their own hard work. (To be clear, it’s a spectrum — tickets come in different sizes, and hard work plays a role — but such nuance has no place in public discourse)

bradleyjg 4y ago

I’ve bootstrapped two companies to success in my eyes which has changed me and my families life. … I’ve also failed miserably and had 5-7 business go under or never even really get off the ground. All other things being equal, I’d expect someone who started 8 businesses and had one mild and one moderate success to have more useful insights to offer than someone who started one business and had it become wildly successful. Yet our culture valorizes the latter to extreme extents. Perhaps that was what “awinkinson” was trying to get at with his pithy comment on that terrible platform.

roflyear 4y ago

The point is you still got lucky. Something helped you beyond doing hard work.

gcanyon 4y ago

All of that seems very "necessary but not sufficient." The fact you had multiple businesses fail seems strongly to argue for that: presumably you didn't violate any of the above points when you failed?

dan-robertson 4y ago

I think it’s probably right that some people are better at running successful startups than others. They might be more willing to try / fail, have better ideas, etc, and it isn’t just stuff like having good connections to funding. I think it could still be true that the advice isn’t very good but not for the reason the tweet gives (I agree the tweet is stupid). In particular, I think there could be a lot of tacit things that aren’t really expressed in advice, especially the ‘startup influencer’ types who give out advice on twitter. For example, it might be that being really good at hiring and having people work on the right thing is a key skill and a successful founder might think they just walked around the office and asked obvious questions without being able to write down what exactly it was they did to steer the company in the right direction.

scarface74 4y ago
Unless your startup was profitable before you sold it, it could just as well be luck and connections and not skill. It takes a lot more skill to run a “profitable” business. I wander how many of those “successful” startups will be successful when they can’t spend years living off of VC funding?