Its fair to say, most of the recommended practices, were applied both by every single successful entrepreneur but also every founder who saw their startup fail.
The problem of these types of recommendations, like work hard, have self-confidence, think independently, is that they are condition necessary but not sufficient for startup success.
It's similar to recommendations on how to make a cake: Make sure the eggs are fresh, measure well the amount of sugar and the oven temperature. None of that will guarantee a prize winning cake:-)
A great piece of advice for founders would be on how to found a startup, and despite consuming 30 millions dollars, still manage to find a buyer willing to pay 43 million dollars for the business. The explanation of those details could provide the business acumen, insight and experience many young founders require.
Certainly all, successful and less successful founders, are focused, working hard, and thinking independently. Otherwise they would not be startup founders.
"In 2005, at age 19,[9] Altman co-founded and became CEO of Loopt,[10] a location-based social networking mobile application. After raising more than $30M in venture capital, Loopt was shut down in 2012 after failing to get traction. It was acquired by the Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million."
> "In 2005, at age 19,[9] Altman co-founded and became CEO of Loopt,[10] a location-based social networking mobile application. After raising more than $30M in venture capital, Loopt was shut down in 2012 after failing to get traction. It was acquired by the Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million."
What a great success...create tons of hype, run the company into the ground and offload overpriced equity onto a bigger fool. The American dream.
No wonder he likes Musk so much. It's basically the same modus operandi.
Title suggestion for next blog-post:
"How to fail upwards" also
"How to play poker with chips payed for with teachers pensions funds"
"No wonder he likes Musk so much. It's basically the same modus operandi."
Both SpaceX and Tesla got helluva lot of traction. The US now depends on the Falcon/Dragon combo to get American astronauts into the orbit, a task which Boeing so far failed to accomplish. And the Ukrainian artillery is pounding Russian targets to pulp with use of Starlink
How this is basically the same as Loopt, I cannot see.
Musk has been at the helm of Tesla for 20 years and in that timeframe he didn't even manage to get to 1% of total vehicles sold globally. In FY21 Tesla still accounted for 0.9% of vehicles sold globally. And it was a slow year for the global auto industry.
That's basically after billions of tax breaks and subsidies at the County, State and Federal level, which were showered on Tesla during the last 20 years, not even mentioning the blind eye that regulators turned on Tesla and Musk personally because they all bought into the narrative that he was Phoney Stark. Again not even 1% in 20 years.
SpaceX is totally dependant upon the goodwill of taxpayers, the moment they lose interest in space, then down goes SpaceX.
The only traction that a person anchored in reality sees is the cult of personality and techo-utopianism that mr. Musk managed to create around himself.
Your space argument is extremely misleading. Space industry in general is dependent on government orders, this is not a unique problem of SpaceX / Musk. How long do you think that Boeing or Morton Thiokol space facilities would survive if the US space program were shuttered?
Unless you consider the entire space activity of humanity a kind of cult/scam/hype, you have to admit that SpaceX technology is competitive.
Couple of interesting bits: So Sequoia Capital had done a 20 million series B into Green Dot Corporation ( now GreenDotBank ) followed by a private equity investment according to public records. By the acquisition time the initial funding of Green Dot was recorded as total of 33 million dollars.
Now it happens Sequoia Capital was also a VC for Loopt, and had put at least 17 million dollars into Loopt, also according to public records.
The deal was 43 million in cash! including 10 million dollars for employee retention of Loopt employees.
Now such a good deal, is what I call the definition of success. And how to close one of these would be a blog worth writing...
No, this endless need to prostrate yourself and attribute everything to luck is silly and harmful.
What does that tell people in less fortunate circumstances? Sorry, you weren’t lucky, too bad. Better just hope some lucky person fixes everything for you because you have no agency over your own life.
You seem to be under the impression that developing palatable narratives for the less fortunate is an objective. Says who? Just because it doesn’t sound fair, that doesn’t mean we can ignore it’s existence. More harmful, we can’t coddle people into believing everyone is very much capable of success and it’s an equal playing field. It’s not.
Entropy and randomness exists. Agency exists. People don’t generally attribute success to solely one or the other. However, think about this: if the objective function is $10MM net worth, and there are two variables, luck & agency, and each variable has a threshold one must exceed before contributing to the objective function, it’s easy to see that randomness (luck) will contribute to your networth, more so than grokking (agency) it.
In other words, a small amount of luck has a larger effect than a small amount of agency. But, if small amount of luck translated to $10MM net worth, isn’t that lucky by definition? Conversely, if a small amount of agency translated to $10MM net worth, what does that mean? Can you say that it was all your efforts that solely got you to $10MM net worth?
It's not just luck, Sam Altman mentions being born lucky. This is more related to topics about family socioeconomic class and other factors, which is important to acknowledge because maybe instead of telling people simply to work hard or have a good mindset, we should be pushing to level the playing field.
There will never be a level playing field. People are different. “Pushing to level the playing field” is just doublespeak for authoritarianism.
Just a quick question, who will be in charge of “leveling the playing field”? Who gets to choose what criteria determines whether it’s level or not? Do you think they might have some advantage? Will it be a level field for them?
Check out the Nordic countries for an example of an attempt to level the playing field. They're not perfect, certainly not authoritarian and have a good social mobility.
These are all hard questions but this is a different debate entirely. I was explaining why acknowledging birth privilege is not the same as just telling people "sorry you weren't lucky, too bad". For the people that believe in leveling the playing field, actual social change can be just as important (if not more) as the mindset and hard work touted by successful people.
True, people are saying it’s nothing but luck, which was my point. It is discouraging and unhelpful to relentlessly best people over the head with nonsense like that, which happens in every post like this.
Is it nonsense when it is backed by studies linked above, experiences shared by others here, and those of our own?
I’ve made plenty of money advising startup entrepreneurs on IP law, incorporation, and tax strategy. That means I have visibility into founders’ most sensitive personal financial information and I can count on my hands how many founders I’ve met who don’t come from financially well-off backgrounds.
That may be a function of the fact that my services are expensive and only those who are well-resourced would seek me out… but truth be told if they can’t afford me they probably couldn’t afford to take the kinds of risks necessary for the success defined in this article.
I say this as someone who was “born lucky” too. If my parents weren’t both professionals with money to invest in my education and a network for me to tap when I started my firm, all the hard work in the world couldn’t guarantee I’d be where I am. And I don’t even consider myself that successful compared to others I know.
The two variables aren’t independent though. Your agency is affected by your own beliefs about luck. Similarly, luck is created by choices.
Trying to quantify these things is a fools errand and I would argue tilts towards social justice narratives. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I do believe it is counter productive for individuals who want to be successful. Everyone has advantages and disadvantages, but the common thread with successful people is a bias for action and not getting lost daydreaming and pontificating.
The Chinese say "luck is the combination of hard work and opportunity". It requires both. There are limitless scenarios in which the same type of hard work will give you a completely different result, if the opportunity never comes.
This is why I am so annoyed by the Left and the Right simplistic view of this.
The Left: "You are rich because your are privileged!"
The Right: "You are poor because you are not working hard enough!"
It’s covered pretty clearly in the post, in the point about establishing a baseline first through privilege or effort. I don’t think it’s necessary to ask which method(s) the author used/had.
It's a pity that Sam's comment above was missing from the original post, and was added after this discussion on HN. It should have been point #1.