19 ms·

Entrepreneurs think they’re badass

130 points by ryancarson 12y ago

nostrademons 12y ago
A corollary to this: if you want to be a badass entrepreneur, focus on getting lucky. The people who really strike it rich - the Elon Musks, Larry Pages, Evan Williamses, Marc Andreessens, Steve Jobses, Mark Zuckerburgs, et al - all seem to devote significant thought and attention to figuring out where the opportunities are that are almost ripe for a company to come in and pick them. To an outsider, it looks like they single-handedly changed the course of history, but if you read in-depth biographies or listen to them speak in person and then try to trace through what their thought process might be, there's a lot of attention to paid to what social or technical trends are just on the cusp of developing, and what the implications of them are. Good entrepreneurs realize that they can't do it alone, so they're always looking out for things that lots of people want to have happen, but need a slight catalyst to get things moving.
- ryancarson 12y ago
  I don't think "focus on getting lucky" is quite right either. I didn't sift through all the available opportunities and choose changing education. I was personally interested in this problem - it mattered to me on an emotional level. I've interviewed Evan Williams and Mark Zuckerberg personally and I see the same pattern there. It kind of sucks to say "You just need to be interested personally in solving a problem" but it's true. I don't think you can simply identify a problem and solve it, without the personal passion.
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    Maybe this is a quirk of my personality, but I'm interested personally in solving a lot of problems. From what I saw of Larry Page's decision-making when I was at Google, this was true of him as well. From there, it's a matter of choosing the intersection of that set with the set of problems that many other people want solved and the set of problems that you personally have the ability to make a dent in right now. Business books like to talk about the "hedgehog" principle: http://ilead.byuh.edu/node/133 http://ilead.byuh.edu/node/133 This is what it means in practice. It helps if all of the sets are relatively large, and the intersection is quite narrowly focused. Usually when I've had "small" successes (projects beloved by a handful of users, but not enough to make any money), it's because I was following my passion but not considering how many other people cared about the problem. When I've had outright failures (like the graveyard of projects that I never completed), it was when I followed my passion for a project that large amounts of people would want, but didn't pay any attention to whether the problem was tractable with the resources I had available to me.
    - ryancarson 12y ago
      Interesting that you were at Google. What did you do there? I'm just finishing "I'm Feeling Lucky" about Google's early days.
      - nostrademons 12y ago
        I was in Search from 2009-2014. Worked on a bunch of projects - 3 visual redesigns, the Authorship program, some miscellaneous infrastructure & internal research projects, 3 interactive homepage doodles, about 1/3 of the easter eggs you see on Wikipedia's list of Google easter eggs, loaned out to GFiber and G+ for their launches, a few other things. It was already a big company by the time I got there, but I had the pleasure of working with several folks who'd been there since it was just a couple hundred people. It was also a pretty interesting time in its history - the first half of my tenure was when Bing was still considered a scary competitor, so we pushed out a lot of innovations in a short time period - and I straddled the Eric Schmidt / Larry Page CEO turnover, so had experience under both CEOs.
        ryancarson 12y ago
        You should blog about it!
        nostrademons 12y ago
        Some day, maybe. For now, I'm much more focused on getting my next great adventure off the ground (which I'm also not really seeking publicity for...my cofounder and I are trying to go directly to target users for feedback and not the general public). Plus, one thing I learned at Google is that there are a large number of employees that do awesome work without seeking credit for it...I was happy to be one of them at the time, and I don't really want to steal the limelight from them.
  - pinkyand 12y ago
    Maybe for some people, their passion lies in money/fame/etc ,but they see very clearly how attacking said opportunity would lead to those, and it gives them enough "passion" and motivation?
    - ryancarson 12y ago
      I pity someone who is 'passionate' about those things.
      - r12s 12y ago
        Yeah, me too. While I'm at it, really loved the post, made me smile (a lot). So you're "fourth time lucky" ;-)
      - tedks 12y ago
        Such an arrogant attitude. As if you'd be working on what you're working on if it didn't get you money or power. One is the other, really. No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end. The truly powerful people in the world -- the ones whose names you don't know, because they don't particularly care for your knowing them -- they never lie to themselves, and they probably know exactly where their passions are. The less powerful people, the Jeff Bezos's and the Larry Ellisons, they probably learned over time. The people who think they do what they do for any other reason are deluding themselves about the game that they're playing. There's only one game.
        PhasmaFelis 12y ago
        > No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end. If you're going to be that reductionist, then you're still wrong. The basic evolutionary drive behind our species, and all others, is to reproduce and spread your genes. Everything else stems, however circuitously, from redirected or misdirected reproductive drive. But either way, you're being silly. For example, I want to make enough money to support myself and afford a few luxuries now and then, and have as much free time as possible to spend with friends, books, and games. It's not technically incorrect to say that I want power (over my life and environment), but to say that my motivations are identical to those of a senator or a billionaire is ridiculous. > The people who think they do what they do for any other reason are deluding themselves about the game that they're playing. There's only one game. See, here's your problem, speaking of delusion. You've let the people playing the game of power trick you into thinking that their game is the only one in town.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    > I don't think you can simply identify a problem and solve it, without the personal passion. Sam Altman indicates this is true in his first lecture at Stanford's startup course.
    - coralreef 12y ago
      Interesting contrast to PG's earlier convention of "the idea doesn't matter as much as the founders because the idea can/will change".
    - fivedogit 12y ago
      Oh I think you absolutely can. In 2002-3 I worked at a PR firm in DC and identified a shortcoming we were experiencing regarding broadcast TV monitoring. I quit my job, built a distributed TV ingestion system + SaaS interface and signed 75 customers to paying subscriptions over the course of a few years. Did I have any "passion" for broadcast monitoring? Absolutely not. I merely had a passion for starting a successful business.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  To do any serious analysis of entrepreneurship you must include a population in your study that "did everything right" and still failed. Studies of successful entrepreneurs are nothing but confirmation bias in action. Sure you can point to N successful people who did X, Y and Z, and follow that with an unjustified claim that X, Y and Z are the keys to the kingdom, but unless you go out and scour the ground for people who also did X, Y and Z and failed, you've said exactly nothing interesting. In particular, you have not increased the posterior plausibility of the claim "people who do X, Y and Z are more likely to be successful" more than a tiny little increment. I say this as a successful businessperson who has worked for a number of failed startups and knows a fair number of people who came within one business decision of "success" (defined as being a millionaire with less than five years of work). These studies of only successful business-people are completely vacuous. It isn't enough to show that "People who were successful did X, Y and Z." You must also show "People who did X, Y and Z had a better chance of success", which is a completely unrelated question, and whose answer can only be ascertained by investigating a reasonably large sample of people selected on the basis of doing X, Y and Z, not on the basis of being successful.
vonklaus 12y ago
On balance, I would consider this a fair appraisal. Black swan companies get built because it is the right time. Obviously, it takes skill to know when that is and that the right time is a range. As time goes on it gets easier to do these things, ie electric cars. These were really hard to do in 2005 but now they seem rather obvious. Be early, be correct, and be gritty.
StephenGL 12y ago
I like the guy, but he doesn't understand the definition of luck.
BerislavLopac 12y ago
One thing missing from the list is "being born and raised in the right part of the world". And I'm not talking about being able to raise capital, but simply being in a society that embraces and promotes entrepreneurship, as well as having easy access to numerous basic amenities such as food, water, health care, Internet (at decent speeds etc).
- ryancarson 12y ago
  That's why I chose my definition carefully. Being able to raise capital is determined by a lot of things that unfortunately, you cannot control. This is one of the reasons I'm so passionate about Treehouse. We can empower more people with the skills to build their first product, without raising capital. Once they have a working product, they're much more likely to be able to raise capital.
staunch 12y ago
If Elon Musk had made $16M, instead of $160M, from PayPal there would be no Tesla or SpaceX. He likely would have spent his time much less productively, and the world would be worse off. And yet, very few people similar to Elon Musk ever find themselves in the position of being rich enough to field an army. In a future where resources aren't so constrained we'll start to see "geniuses" everywhere.
- solistice 12y ago
  Wouldn't we just start to delve into larger projects? I kinda developed this theory playing on a modded minecraft server where we'll hit peak engineering. I'm trying to simulate industrial ascenscion on there right now, moving from nothing to self-sustainability to post-scarcity. And whilst resource aquisition goes up exponentially, the machinery I build becomes more and more complex, and the time I spend engineering things goes up dramatically. I moved from half an hour of thinking on each project to spending an average of a week on most of my current projects. The next one down the line I'm projecting at about a month, gathering data, designing and testing. Now I understand that directly applying that to a larger system isn't prudent, but I notice distinct similarities in other projects I take on, with the only difference being time scales and project complexity. Which makes sense, since civilisation as a whole, or even a career take a lot longer than the two months I've been playing around with the idea in a simplified system. So I personally believe that once we hit that point, we'll be at a state of peak engineering, where our progress and the size of the projects we can take on is limited by the amount of brainpower we can spend on them. What I'm saying is that there won't be geniuses everywhere. We'll be more productive as a whole, but there's a ceiling on how much can be done by one person in a given timeframe.
- beambot 12y ago
  Before PayPal, Musk was heavily involved in Zip2. Upon its sale, he netted $22M. So that suggests an answer to your question: If he hadn't netted $160M from PayPal, he would've founded another company where he could go bigger. Zip2 details on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
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wyager 12y ago
You can't win if you don't play. It's not like successful entrepreneurs were just sitting on their asses and success smote them like a lightning bolt. Yes, there's a lot of luck involved, but it takes hard, risky work that most people aren't willing to put in just to have a chance at capturing that luck.
- svdree 12y ago
  "I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  This is true, but I think it's important to remember that you really do need both hard work and luck. The insidious American myth is that hard work is the one and only ingredient to success. The implication, of course, is that anyone who doesn't succeed must be lazy or otherwise undeserving, no matter how diligently they actually worked.
deleted 12y ago
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gumby 12y ago
Years ago someone said to me, "Luck happens to those who let it." It's stuck with me, because I think it's so true. In fact it's what makes Napoleon's famous (and probably apocryphal) statement actionable: "When I choose Generals I prefer the lucky ones." I've started large companies and tiny / failed ones; although I look back at my own execution problems for the ones that didn't make it, I recognize that the ones that succeeded were lucky, and we were just lucky enough to be able to take advantage of that luck. For example: - tons of cold calls and regular sales calls until we accidentally signed up the right kinds of customers - having some customers who told us how we should be running our business, and being smart enough to listen to them - recognizing at one point, "hey, we're making all our money from customers who ask for Y, why do we think our business is X?" (i.e. what hipsters these days call a "pivot") etc I love the ones who think they're badass -- they're too busy being badass to slog through the mire and get to the mountain.
- jbhatab 12y ago
  I understand where you are coming from, but you should also acknowledge the other side of ego too. Ego can fuel people to become their vision of themselves and people with egos tend to have a hard working self image. I'm not saying ego is good, because it can take you down if not managed. But to say that there are no positives is a little bit extreme.
  - gumby 12y ago
    > "people with egos tend to have a hard working self image" I guess I haven't seen this much! Yes, if you're a shrinking violet and can't put yourself out there you will have a hard time succeeding in almost any domain, but the ability to do so can be learned. In my experience, when someone says "ego" it usually means "asshole".
- ryancarson 12y ago
  > the ones that succeeded were lucky, and we were just lucky enough to be able to take advantage of that luck. Amen. Amen. I'd love to hear more about your past adventures. What were the large companies and the failed/tiny ones?
cynusx 12y ago
Riding a trend is definitely a sensible thing to do, it reminds me of a lesson that's quite common in fighting sports is to use an opponents momentum to your own advantage. That said, you can get lucky and happen to work on one of the trends or you can try to spot one and ride it consciously. There's a factor that doesn't change though, you need to be able to execute and I think Ryan is giving himself way too little credit for being good at execution. In particular he had already garnered a significant following with carsonified conferences and his blog before thinkvitamin (now treehouse) took off at the time. There's always the cautionary tale of friendster, who could have been Facebook if they had been better at product management.
- ryancarson 12y ago
  Thanks for the kind words
analog31 12y ago
4. Happy to take risks I always wonder what people mean by "risk" in this context. If risk is a probability of failure, then if someone has minimized that probability through other means (seeing an opportunity where others haven't, working real hard, etc.) then it isn't risk. If others aren't trying to do the same thing and failing at it, then it might not be risky. The "risk" thing may just be part of the badass image, but I've read in other places that entrepreneurs actually tend to be risk averse. Rather than simply taking risks, what they (we?) do is to use their skills and knowledge to arrange matters so that their own risk is reduced, even if the same activity might be more risky for someone else who doesn't have the same insight.
- optimiz3 12y ago
  It means willing to incur the significant opportunity costs (income and benefits) of not working for an established company. EDIT: Also the risk to reputation and social stigma that goes along with being poor...and enduring this for years...until you're not :).
  - ryancarson 12y ago
    I like that definition :)
  - analog31 12y ago
    That's valid, though even those risks can be mitigated to some extent by having wealth or a side income. It's still risk in terms of dollars times probability, but not in terms of the risk of getting thrown out on the street. And in other cases, the risk could be real after all. For instance the high probability of failure for start-ups is a pretty straightforward measure of risk, and the people who start start-ups are probably incurring that risk on average.
- Varcht 12y ago
  I think the risk in this context is to make a guess and go all in on it. It's the opposite of taking the time to reach a high level of certainty before starting.
porter 12y ago
Do you think you had to go through those first few small wins in order to finally take a swing at a homerun? What changed when you did treehouse vs those other smaller businesses? Was it the fact that you didn't need to worry about money in the short-term anymore (because of those small exits), or something else?
- ryancarson 12y ago
  I'm lucky that I could refine my skills through those first three businesses. If Treehouse was my first big idea, I'd have no choice. I'd just have to do the best I could. > What changed when you did treehouse vs those other smaller businesses? Was it the fact that you didn't need to worry about money in the short-term anymore (because of those small exits), or something else? I didn't make quite enough from those exits to be financially independent, so I still need to make Treehouse work from a money perspective personally. The simple thing that changed was the scope of the idea. It was world-changing scale - millions of potential lives affected.
  - porter 12y ago
    What advice do you have for founders working on non world-changing ideas, but rather ideas more like your first 3 small ideas?
    - ryancarson 12y ago
      Just keep doing the best you can. If you don't have what appears to be a world-changing idea right now, you still are providing value by creating jobs and offering value to your customers. I didn't know I was going to create Treehouse until it happened. Hindsight is always 20-20.
      - porter 12y ago
        I'm curious, have you ever thought about why building a startup with more revenues and more "impact" seems to matter more than building smaller companies? I know this is a bit philosophical, but I'd be interested in hearing how you think about this.
paul9290 12y ago
Indeed, the following factors below is what makes you a success... 1. Luck/Serendipity - Your startup launches for the first or fifth time & boom gets traction, which money/success immediately follows. Think Pinterest, Uber, Facebook, Youtube; basically it's like winning the lottery! and 2. Network - You know the right people & or convinced them to give you their resources (their connections & money). With this you can do the hard work (have the runway) to make things happen, though maybe not. Good luck everyone!
- onewaystreet 12y ago
  Pinterest is the only one of those companies whose success was close to immediate. Uber, Facebook, Youtube all had to grind it out. Uber battled (and still is) many legal challenges; YouTube almost went the way of Napster early on; and Facebook was an underdog to MySpace for a long time.
  - paul9290 12y ago
    As I recall, Uber was picked up quickly in San Francisco. I recall Mike Arrington raving about it when it first launched. It had instant uptake in tech circles & early adopters. Facebook was instant in the fact that when launched it took Harvard by storm and then grew like a weed thereafter.
- xiaoma 12y ago
  YouTube was especially amazing in its speed. It went from zero to a $1.6B acquisition is just a year and a half.
jsonmez 12y ago
What he says not only proves that he is absolutely right, but it also proves that he is absolutely wrong. Kind of reminds me of this: After his service in the war, Socrates devoted himself to his favorite pastime: the pursuit of truth. His reputation as a philosopher, literally meaning 'a lover of wisdom', soon spread all over Athens and beyond. When told that the Oracle of Delphi had revealed to one of his friends that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens, he responded not by boasting or celebrating, but by trying to prove the Oracle wrong. So Socrates decided he would try and find out if anyone knew what was truly worthwhile in life, because anyone who knew that would surely be wiser than him. He set about questioning everyone he could find, but no one could give him a satisfactory answer. Instead they all pretended to know something they clearly did not. Finally he realized the Oracle might be right after all. He was the wisest man in Athens because he alone was prepared to admit his own ignorance rather than pretend to know something he did not.
- ryancarson 12y ago
  I think that was either a huge compliment, or a terrible slight, but I can't quite figure out which one :)
  - jsonmez 12y ago
    Let me put it this way: You see things that other people don't.
    - ryancarson 12y ago
      Thank you
wamatt 12y ago
The author makes a familiar point, though it's worth repeating, if only as a reminder to stay humble. That said, I can't help but recall a quote from one of the greatest pro golfers: "The harder I practice, the luckier I get" - Gary Player Note: the logic only flows one way, in that working hard does not mean one will be successful. Also, there are scant examples of self-made (eg. not inherited) successes without working extremely hard. In other words it's a mostly necessary, but not sufficient condition.
adamzerner 12y ago
[Probability is in the mind](http://lesswrong.com/lw/oj/probability_is_in_the_mind/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/oj/probability_is_in_the_mind/). It's a reflection of our limited information, not reality. There really isn't anything inherently probabilistic about startups. If we had the right information and enough reasoning ability, we would be able to turn the dials just right. That's in theory. In practice, it's hard to acquire enough information. This is where luck comes into play. You need luck when your information is limited. But in practice, I don't think we should be overly humble worshipers of this "luck". Yes, it's pretty important, but I think you could reach a point of having enough information and reasoning ability where luck is a notably smaller component of success than skill. I think that we have a ways to go in terms of improving our information and reasoning ability. * For example, startup ideas are rarely strategically chosen amongst carefully thought out alternatives. They usually just emerge from a side-project. * And founders really struggle to [isolate](http://lesswrong.com/lw/bc3/sotw_be_specific/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/bc3/sotw_be_specific/) what it really is that gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors. I think that in 50 years, people will have gotten "good enough" at startups such that luck is a smaller determinant of success than skill.
- wpietri 12y ago
  > If we had the right information and enough reasoning ability, we would be able to turn the dials just right. That's in theory. Alas, not even in theory, because other actors are generating new information. Some of that new information will specifically be in response to your actions. Even if over time skill and knowledge increase, that will be true for everybody. So luck will continue to be as important. Possibly more so; it seems to me that increasing knowledge reduces the opportunity for individual skill to make a difference.
- tedks 12y ago
  It's hilarious to me that someone linking to less wrong isn't rational enough to know that reddit markup doesn't work on hacker news. Somehow, the rationality never much further than discussing fictional AI scenarios.
  - 12y ago
chavesn 12y ago
Summary: Hey, I run an awesome company and look at my face on this magazine. Actually, I really am impressed, and it looks like Carson has good reason to brag. That's cool. But I don't feel like there is all that much substance here. For one, I think Carson himself is discounting that the difference between doing nothing and making $450K on the sale of a business is actually bigger than $450K and the $100M business he's building now. He's living proof that there is more to it than luck, but he's saying the opposite. I guess what's really bugging me here is that the message here is meant to be valuable -- "Anyone can do it." But paradoxically, when Carson and others like him give themselves no credit for their success, then there is nothing we can learn from them. It's like participation trophies -- they don't really teach anybody how to search inside themselves and find the way to win.
- ryancarson 12y ago
  > when Carson and others like him give themselves no credit for their success, then there is nothing we can learn from them. That's the whole point of the post. There aren't any quick tips, todos or silver bullets I can give you that will help you. The post isn't meant to be ultimately affirming. It's just reality as I see it. > Summary: Hey, I run an awesome company and look at my face on this magazine. I'm sorry that's your takeaway. I've failed to communicate to you the reason I wrote it.
  - chavesn 12y ago
    Hey, glad to see you're here. Let me clarify. As humble as your position is, I'm trying to say that you should be proud of your success, because there is probably good reason for it. I'm not one to tell you whether you actually believe that or not, but I would suspect it to be true. But, I do totally agree about "quick tips, todos, or silver bullets". Regardless of that, I'm sure there is something reasonable special about you that has driven you in particular to create at least three moderately successful businesses. Something we could probably learn from.
thinkerer 12y ago
That's why most who have seen some success would say (or so I have heard from their mouths): "The more you try, the luckier you get". There may be an element of luck that may affect to a significant extent (think lottery) without or having little attempts but in the long run it pans out. This highlights not only the importance of sticking it out, but sticking it out long enough, even after getting smashed many times over. But of course, there has to be a specific and unique insight as a starting point, ala how can you make something better than whats out there now? Its not surprising that people whom are passionate about their circle of competency, those who would venture in all directions from their initial locus/loci, seemingly random areas would pick up observations that others miss. And only those with a genuine passion and interest will continue sticking out, even in the darkest times.
logn 12y ago
I know some entrepreneurs who I think would do well in any era with any idea of the time. My office neighbor 20 years ago was selling vinyl phone book covers and did well. Now he's in SEO. And he's looking to get into healthcare devices next. His entire life is about finding sellable ideas and immersing himself in them until he's an expert. Kind of like the idea that a bank loan officer should avoid business loans to people pursuing their passions and instead focus on the loaning to people who have hard data about why their business will make money.

130 points by ryancarson 12y ago

A corollary to this: if you want to be a badass entrepreneur, focus on getting lucky. The people who really strike it rich - the Elon Musks, Larry Pages, Evan Williamses, Marc Andreessens, Steve Jobses, Mark Zuckerburgs, et al - all seem to devote significant thought and attention to figuring out where the opportunities are that are almost ripe for a company to come in and pick them. To an outsider, it looks like they single-handedly changed the course of history, but if you read in-depth biographies or listen to them speak in person and then try to trace through what their thought process might be, there's a lot of attention to paid to what social or technical trends are just on the cusp of developing, and what the implications of them are. Good entrepreneurs realize that they can't do it alone, so they're always looking out for things that lots of people want to have happen, but need a slight catalyst to get things moving.

ryancarson 12y ago
I don't think "focus on getting lucky" is quite right either. I didn't sift through all the available opportunities and choose changing education. I was personally interested in this problem - it mattered to me on an emotional level. I've interviewed Evan Williams and Mark Zuckerberg personally and I see the same pattern there. It kind of sucks to say "You just need to be interested personally in solving a problem" but it's true. I don't think you can simply identify a problem and solve it, without the personal passion.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  Maybe this is a quirk of my personality, but I'm interested personally in solving a lot of problems. From what I saw of Larry Page's decision-making when I was at Google, this was true of him as well. From there, it's a matter of choosing the intersection of that set with the set of problems that many other people want solved and the set of problems that you personally have the ability to make a dent in right now. Business books like to talk about the "hedgehog" principle: http://ilead.byuh.edu/node/133 http://ilead.byuh.edu/node/133 This is what it means in practice. It helps if all of the sets are relatively large, and the intersection is quite narrowly focused. Usually when I've had "small" successes (projects beloved by a handful of users, but not enough to make any money), it's because I was following my passion but not considering how many other people cared about the problem. When I've had outright failures (like the graveyard of projects that I never completed), it was when I followed my passion for a project that large amounts of people would want, but didn't pay any attention to whether the problem was tractable with the resources I had available to me.
  - ryancarson 12y ago
    Interesting that you were at Google. What did you do there? I'm just finishing "I'm Feeling Lucky" about Google's early days.
    - nostrademons 12y ago
      I was in Search from 2009-2014. Worked on a bunch of projects - 3 visual redesigns, the Authorship program, some miscellaneous infrastructure & internal research projects, 3 interactive homepage doodles, about 1/3 of the easter eggs you see on Wikipedia's list of Google easter eggs, loaned out to GFiber and G+ for their launches, a few other things. It was already a big company by the time I got there, but I had the pleasure of working with several folks who'd been there since it was just a couple hundred people. It was also a pretty interesting time in its history - the first half of my tenure was when Bing was still considered a scary competitor, so we pushed out a lot of innovations in a short time period - and I straddled the Eric Schmidt / Larry Page CEO turnover, so had experience under both CEOs.
      - ryancarson 12y ago
        You should blog about it!
        nostrademons 12y ago
        Some day, maybe. For now, I'm much more focused on getting my next great adventure off the ground (which I'm also not really seeking publicity for...my cofounder and I are trying to go directly to target users for feedback and not the general public). Plus, one thing I learned at Google is that there are a large number of employees that do awesome work without seeking credit for it...I was happy to be one of them at the time, and I don't really want to steal the limelight from them.
- pinkyand 12y ago
  Maybe for some people, their passion lies in money/fame/etc ,but they see very clearly how attacking said opportunity would lead to those, and it gives them enough "passion" and motivation?
  - ryancarson 12y ago
    I pity someone who is 'passionate' about those things.
    - r12s 12y ago
      Yeah, me too. While I'm at it, really loved the post, made me smile (a lot). So you're "fourth time lucky" ;-)
    - tedks 12y ago
      Such an arrogant attitude. As if you'd be working on what you're working on if it didn't get you money or power. One is the other, really. No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end. The truly powerful people in the world -- the ones whose names you don't know, because they don't particularly care for your knowing them -- they never lie to themselves, and they probably know exactly where their passions are. The less powerful people, the Jeff Bezos's and the Larry Ellisons, they probably learned over time. The people who think they do what they do for any other reason are deluding themselves about the game that they're playing. There's only one game.
      - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
        > No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end. If you're going to be that reductionist, then you're still wrong. The basic evolutionary drive behind our species, and all others, is to reproduce and spread your genes. Everything else stems, however circuitously, from redirected or misdirected reproductive drive. But either way, you're being silly. For example, I want to make enough money to support myself and afford a few luxuries now and then, and have as much free time as possible to spend with friends, books, and games. It's not technically incorrect to say that I want power (over my life and environment), but to say that my motivations are identical to those of a senator or a billionaire is ridiculous. > The people who think they do what they do for any other reason are deluding themselves about the game that they're playing. There's only one game. See, here's your problem, speaking of delusion. You've let the people playing the game of power trick you into thinking that their game is the only one in town.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > I don't think you can simply identify a problem and solve it, without the personal passion. Sam Altman indicates this is true in his first lecture at Stanford's startup course.
  - coralreef 12y ago
    Interesting contrast to PG's earlier convention of "the idea doesn't matter as much as the founders because the idea can/will change".
  - fivedogit 12y ago
    Oh I think you absolutely can. In 2002-3 I worked at a PR firm in DC and identified a shortcoming we were experiencing regarding broadcast TV monitoring. I quit my job, built a distributed TV ingestion system + SaaS interface and signed 75 customers to paying subscriptions over the course of a few years. Did I have any "passion" for broadcast monitoring? Absolutely not. I merely had a passion for starting a successful business.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
To do any serious analysis of entrepreneurship you must include a population in your study that "did everything right" and still failed. Studies of successful entrepreneurs are nothing but confirmation bias in action. Sure you can point to N successful people who did X, Y and Z, and follow that with an unjustified claim that X, Y and Z are the keys to the kingdom, but unless you go out and scour the ground for people who also did X, Y and Z and failed, you've said exactly nothing interesting. In particular, you have not increased the posterior plausibility of the claim "people who do X, Y and Z are more likely to be successful" more than a tiny little increment. I say this as a successful businessperson who has worked for a number of failed startups and knows a fair number of people who came within one business decision of "success" (defined as being a millionaire with less than five years of work). These studies of only successful business-people are completely vacuous. It isn't enough to show that "People who were successful did X, Y and Z." You must also show "People who did X, Y and Z had a better chance of success", which is a completely unrelated question, and whose answer can only be ascertained by investigating a reasonably large sample of people selected on the basis of doing X, Y and Z, not on the basis of being successful.

vonklaus 12y ago

On balance, I would consider this a fair appraisal. Black swan companies get built because it is the right time. Obviously, it takes skill to know when that is and that the right time is a range. As time goes on it gets easier to do these things, ie electric cars. These were really hard to do in 2005 but now they seem rather obvious. Be early, be correct, and be gritty.

StephenGL 12y ago

I like the guy, but he doesn't understand the definition of luck.

BerislavLopac 12y ago

One thing missing from the list is "being born and raised in the right part of the world". And I'm not talking about being able to raise capital, but simply being in a society that embraces and promotes entrepreneurship, as well as having easy access to numerous basic amenities such as food, water, health care, Internet (at decent speeds etc).

ryancarson 12y ago
That's why I chose my definition carefully. Being able to raise capital is determined by a lot of things that unfortunately, you cannot control. This is one of the reasons I'm so passionate about Treehouse. We can empower more people with the skills to build their first product, without raising capital. Once they have a working product, they're much more likely to be able to raise capital.

staunch 12y ago

If Elon Musk had made $16M, instead of $160M, from PayPal there would be no Tesla or SpaceX. He likely would have spent his time much less productively, and the world would be worse off. And yet, very few people similar to Elon Musk ever find themselves in the position of being rich enough to field an army. In a future where resources aren't so constrained we'll start to see "geniuses" everywhere.

solistice 12y ago
Wouldn't we just start to delve into larger projects? I kinda developed this theory playing on a modded minecraft server where we'll hit peak engineering. I'm trying to simulate industrial ascenscion on there right now, moving from nothing to self-sustainability to post-scarcity. And whilst resource aquisition goes up exponentially, the machinery I build becomes more and more complex, and the time I spend engineering things goes up dramatically. I moved from half an hour of thinking on each project to spending an average of a week on most of my current projects. The next one down the line I'm projecting at about a month, gathering data, designing and testing. Now I understand that directly applying that to a larger system isn't prudent, but I notice distinct similarities in other projects I take on, with the only difference being time scales and project complexity. Which makes sense, since civilisation as a whole, or even a career take a lot longer than the two months I've been playing around with the idea in a simplified system. So I personally believe that once we hit that point, we'll be at a state of peak engineering, where our progress and the size of the projects we can take on is limited by the amount of brainpower we can spend on them. What I'm saying is that there won't be geniuses everywhere. We'll be more productive as a whole, but there's a ceiling on how much can be done by one person in a given timeframe.
beambot 12y ago
Before PayPal, Musk was heavily involved in Zip2. Upon its sale, he netted $22M. So that suggests an answer to your question: If he hadn't netted $160M from PayPal, he would've founded another company where he could go bigger. Zip2 details on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
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wyager 12y ago

You can't win if you don't play. It's not like successful entrepreneurs were just sitting on their asses and success smote them like a lightning bolt. Yes, there's a lot of luck involved, but it takes hard, risky work that most people aren't willing to put in just to have a chance at capturing that luck.

svdree 12y ago
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."
PhasmaFelis 12y ago
This is true, but I think it's important to remember that you really do need both hard work and luck. The insidious American myth is that hard work is the one and only ingredient to success. The implication, of course, is that anyone who doesn't succeed must be lazy or otherwise undeserving, no matter how diligently they actually worked.

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gumby 12y ago

Years ago someone said to me, "Luck happens to those who let it." It's stuck with me, because I think it's so true. In fact it's what makes Napoleon's famous (and probably apocryphal) statement actionable: "When I choose Generals I prefer the lucky ones." I've started large companies and tiny / failed ones; although I look back at my own execution problems for the ones that didn't make it, I recognize that the ones that succeeded were lucky, and we were just lucky enough to be able to take advantage of that luck. For example: - tons of cold calls and regular sales calls until we accidentally signed up the right kinds of customers - having some customers who told us how we should be running our business, and being smart enough to listen to them - recognizing at one point, "hey, we're making all our money from customers who ask for Y, why do we think our business is X?" (i.e. what hipsters these days call a "pivot") etc I love the ones who think they're badass -- they're too busy being badass to slog through the mire and get to the mountain.

jbhatab 12y ago
I understand where you are coming from, but you should also acknowledge the other side of ego too. Ego can fuel people to become their vision of themselves and people with egos tend to have a hard working self image. I'm not saying ego is good, because it can take you down if not managed. But to say that there are no positives is a little bit extreme.
- gumby 12y ago
  > "people with egos tend to have a hard working self image" I guess I haven't seen this much! Yes, if you're a shrinking violet and can't put yourself out there you will have a hard time succeeding in almost any domain, but the ability to do so can be learned. In my experience, when someone says "ego" it usually means "asshole".
ryancarson 12y ago
> the ones that succeeded were lucky, and we were just lucky enough to be able to take advantage of that luck. Amen. Amen. I'd love to hear more about your past adventures. What were the large companies and the failed/tiny ones?

cynusx 12y ago

Riding a trend is definitely a sensible thing to do, it reminds me of a lesson that's quite common in fighting sports is to use an opponents momentum to your own advantage. That said, you can get lucky and happen to work on one of the trends or you can try to spot one and ride it consciously. There's a factor that doesn't change though, you need to be able to execute and I think Ryan is giving himself way too little credit for being good at execution. In particular he had already garnered a significant following with carsonified conferences and his blog before thinkvitamin (now treehouse) took off at the time. There's always the cautionary tale of friendster, who could have been Facebook if they had been better at product management.

ryancarson 12y ago
Thanks for the kind words

analog31 12y ago

4. Happy to take risks I always wonder what people mean by "risk" in this context. If risk is a probability of failure, then if someone has minimized that probability through other means (seeing an opportunity where others haven't, working real hard, etc.) then it isn't risk. If others aren't trying to do the same thing and failing at it, then it might not be risky. The "risk" thing may just be part of the badass image, but I've read in other places that entrepreneurs actually tend to be risk averse. Rather than simply taking risks, what they (we?) do is to use their skills and knowledge to arrange matters so that their own risk is reduced, even if the same activity might be more risky for someone else who doesn't have the same insight.

optimiz3 12y ago
It means willing to incur the significant opportunity costs (income and benefits) of not working for an established company. EDIT: Also the risk to reputation and social stigma that goes along with being poor...and enduring this for years...until you're not :).
- ryancarson 12y ago
  I like that definition :)
- analog31 12y ago
  That's valid, though even those risks can be mitigated to some extent by having wealth or a side income. It's still risk in terms of dollars times probability, but not in terms of the risk of getting thrown out on the street. And in other cases, the risk could be real after all. For instance the high probability of failure for start-ups is a pretty straightforward measure of risk, and the people who start start-ups are probably incurring that risk on average.
Varcht 12y ago
I think the risk in this context is to make a guess and go all in on it. It's the opposite of taking the time to reach a high level of certainty before starting.

porter 12y ago

Do you think you had to go through those first few small wins in order to finally take a swing at a homerun? What changed when you did treehouse vs those other smaller businesses? Was it the fact that you didn't need to worry about money in the short-term anymore (because of those small exits), or something else?

ryancarson 12y ago
I'm lucky that I could refine my skills through those first three businesses. If Treehouse was my first big idea, I'd have no choice. I'd just have to do the best I could. > What changed when you did treehouse vs those other smaller businesses? Was it the fact that you didn't need to worry about money in the short-term anymore (because of those small exits), or something else? I didn't make quite enough from those exits to be financially independent, so I still need to make Treehouse work from a money perspective personally. The simple thing that changed was the scope of the idea. It was world-changing scale - millions of potential lives affected.
- porter 12y ago
  What advice do you have for founders working on non world-changing ideas, but rather ideas more like your first 3 small ideas?
  - ryancarson 12y ago
    Just keep doing the best you can. If you don't have what appears to be a world-changing idea right now, you still are providing value by creating jobs and offering value to your customers. I didn't know I was going to create Treehouse until it happened. Hindsight is always 20-20.
    - porter 12y ago
      I'm curious, have you ever thought about why building a startup with more revenues and more "impact" seems to matter more than building smaller companies? I know this is a bit philosophical, but I'd be interested in hearing how you think about this.

paul9290 12y ago

Indeed, the following factors below is what makes you a success... 1. Luck/Serendipity - Your startup launches for the first or fifth time & boom gets traction, which money/success immediately follows. Think Pinterest, Uber, Facebook, Youtube; basically it's like winning the lottery! and 2. Network - You know the right people & or convinced them to give you their resources (their connections & money). With this you can do the hard work (have the runway) to make things happen, though maybe not. Good luck everyone!

onewaystreet 12y ago
Pinterest is the only one of those companies whose success was close to immediate. Uber, Facebook, Youtube all had to grind it out. Uber battled (and still is) many legal challenges; YouTube almost went the way of Napster early on; and Facebook was an underdog to MySpace for a long time.
- paul9290 12y ago
  As I recall, Uber was picked up quickly in San Francisco. I recall Mike Arrington raving about it when it first launched. It had instant uptake in tech circles & early adopters. Facebook was instant in the fact that when launched it took Harvard by storm and then grew like a weed thereafter.
xiaoma 12y ago
YouTube was especially amazing in its speed. It went from zero to a $1.6B acquisition is just a year and a half.

jsonmez 12y ago

What he says not only proves that he is absolutely right, but it also proves that he is absolutely wrong. Kind of reminds me of this: After his service in the war, Socrates devoted himself to his favorite pastime: the pursuit of truth. His reputation as a philosopher, literally meaning 'a lover of wisdom', soon spread all over Athens and beyond. When told that the Oracle of Delphi had revealed to one of his friends that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens, he responded not by boasting or celebrating, but by trying to prove the Oracle wrong. So Socrates decided he would try and find out if anyone knew what was truly worthwhile in life, because anyone who knew that would surely be wiser than him. He set about questioning everyone he could find, but no one could give him a satisfactory answer. Instead they all pretended to know something they clearly did not. Finally he realized the Oracle might be right after all. He was the wisest man in Athens because he alone was prepared to admit his own ignorance rather than pretend to know something he did not.

ryancarson 12y ago
I think that was either a huge compliment, or a terrible slight, but I can't quite figure out which one :)
- jsonmez 12y ago
  Let me put it this way: You see things that other people don't.
  - ryancarson 12y ago
    Thank you

wamatt 12y ago

The author makes a familiar point, though it's worth repeating, if only as a reminder to stay humble. That said, I can't help but recall a quote from one of the greatest pro golfers: "The harder I practice, the luckier I get" - Gary Player Note: the logic only flows one way, in that working hard does not mean one will be successful. Also, there are scant examples of self-made (eg. not inherited) successes without working extremely hard. In other words it's a mostly necessary, but not sufficient condition.

adamzerner 12y ago

[Probability is in the mind](http://lesswrong.com/lw/oj/probability_is_in_the_mind/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/oj/probability_is_in_the_mind/). It's a reflection of our limited information, not reality. There really isn't anything inherently probabilistic about startups. If we had the right information and enough reasoning ability, we would be able to turn the dials just right. That's in theory. In practice, it's hard to acquire enough information. This is where luck comes into play. You need luck when your information is limited. But in practice, I don't think we should be overly humble worshipers of this "luck". Yes, it's pretty important, but I think you could reach a point of having enough information and reasoning ability where luck is a notably smaller component of success than skill. I think that we have a ways to go in terms of improving our information and reasoning ability. * For example, startup ideas are rarely strategically chosen amongst carefully thought out alternatives. They usually just emerge from a side-project. * And founders really struggle to [isolate](http://lesswrong.com/lw/bc3/sotw_be_specific/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/bc3/sotw_be_specific/) what it really is that gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors. I think that in 50 years, people will have gotten "good enough" at startups such that luck is a smaller determinant of success than skill.

wpietri 12y ago
> If we had the right information and enough reasoning ability, we would be able to turn the dials just right. That's in theory. Alas, not even in theory, because other actors are generating new information. Some of that new information will specifically be in response to your actions. Even if over time skill and knowledge increase, that will be true for everybody. So luck will continue to be as important. Possibly more so; it seems to me that increasing knowledge reduces the opportunity for individual skill to make a difference.
tedks 12y ago
It's hilarious to me that someone linking to less wrong isn't rational enough to know that reddit markup doesn't work on hacker news. Somehow, the rationality never much further than discussing fictional AI scenarios.
- 12y ago

chavesn 12y ago

Summary: Hey, I run an awesome company and look at my face on this magazine. Actually, I really am impressed, and it looks like Carson has good reason to brag. That's cool. But I don't feel like there is all that much substance here. For one, I think Carson himself is discounting that the difference between doing nothing and making $450K on the sale of a business is actually bigger than $450K and the $100M business he's building now. He's living proof that there is more to it than luck, but he's saying the opposite. I guess what's really bugging me here is that the message here is meant to be valuable -- "Anyone can do it." But paradoxically, when Carson and others like him give themselves no credit for their success, then there is nothing we can learn from them. It's like participation trophies -- they don't really teach anybody how to search inside themselves and find the way to win.

ryancarson 12y ago
> when Carson and others like him give themselves no credit for their success, then there is nothing we can learn from them. That's the whole point of the post. There aren't any quick tips, todos or silver bullets I can give you that will help you. The post isn't meant to be ultimately affirming. It's just reality as I see it. > Summary: Hey, I run an awesome company and look at my face on this magazine. I'm sorry that's your takeaway. I've failed to communicate to you the reason I wrote it.
- chavesn 12y ago
  Hey, glad to see you're here. Let me clarify. As humble as your position is, I'm trying to say that you should be proud of your success, because there is probably good reason for it. I'm not one to tell you whether you actually believe that or not, but I would suspect it to be true. But, I do totally agree about "quick tips, todos, or silver bullets". Regardless of that, I'm sure there is something reasonable special about you that has driven you in particular to create at least three moderately successful businesses. Something we could probably learn from.

thinkerer 12y ago

That's why most who have seen some success would say (or so I have heard from their mouths): "The more you try, the luckier you get". There may be an element of luck that may affect to a significant extent (think lottery) without or having little attempts but in the long run it pans out. This highlights not only the importance of sticking it out, but sticking it out long enough, even after getting smashed many times over. But of course, there has to be a specific and unique insight as a starting point, ala how can you make something better than whats out there now? Its not surprising that people whom are passionate about their circle of competency, those who would venture in all directions from their initial locus/loci, seemingly random areas would pick up observations that others miss. And only those with a genuine passion and interest will continue sticking out, even in the darkest times.

logn 12y ago

I know some entrepreneurs who I think would do well in any era with any idea of the time. My office neighbor 20 years ago was selling vinyl phone book covers and did well. Now he's in SEO. And he's looking to get into healthcare devices next. His entire life is about finding sellable ideas and immersing himself in them until he's an expert. Kind of like the idea that a bank loan officer should avoid business loans to people pursuing their passions and instead focus on the loaning to people who have hard data about why their business will make money.