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Comment by svisser | Hacker News Reader

"I deeply believe that if three recent college grads (and one dropout) could turn an online reality tv show into a billion dollar company then literally anyone can be successful online."

There are so many things wrong with drawing that conclusion.

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No there really isn't. Justin is getting at a truth about startups: "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich." Paul Graham wrote that 8 years ago (http://paulgraham.com/die.html), and I wonder if it was (subconsciously?) an inspiration to this post by Justin? My guess is that it's actually more likely that Justin feels this truth intuitively. I believe that this is a truth that is so fundamental to startups that if I could ask founders only one question when investing, it would be, "When will you give up?"

Not dieing is ofcourse the key which is where the luck must kick in big time. I think most startup don't die because founders give up but rather because there are no real options left, just strong desire for not dieing is not enough. One key thing Justin mentions is being in growth market. What if you realize after 5 years that your user base for purple coat wearing alternate movie lovers isn't a growth market? The next logical step would be pivot which is technically a death followed by another cycle - if you have funding leftover. Justin.TV itself was on the verge of folding up because of inability to pay for bandwidth and if Twitch idea hadn't occurred at right moment (aka huge luck) then no one would have known them now. Luck has played huge part in probably every startup Justin has mentioned. For example, Reddit would have perhaps never taken off if Digg didn't screwed up with its redesign. Also all of those startups were immensely blessed by social network of Y and pg which average joe founder would not have and that itself reduces dependency on being lucky.

Having said all that, I think Justin has put the simple success receipe quite succinctly in this article: Produce, get feedback and iterate. Doing this enough number of times in growth market can produce very likely success. That's beautiful, powerful, compact advice.

Justin.tv was not on the verge of folding when we pivoted to Twitch, in fact, we achieved profitability the year before.

I totally agree with the post, but it goes beyond just startups it applies to anything you are trying to achieve in life.

Are you trying to; learn to play the piano, climb a mountain, loose weight, be a racer car driver and so on? It pretty much applies to anything that you are trying to achieve where the obstacle is just you. If you just survive, just do it for one more day. Just one more....everyday, you will succeed.

I heard Justin talk about this at a conference a couple of years ago and it's one of the few pieces of advice I have taken to heart.

Yeah...it's akin to saying "I believe that [extreme outliers happen], then [they define the general rule]." Their outcome is wonderful, and I'm happy for them, but it's so many sigmas from the norm they may as well be Toyota consultants from the 90s.

"it's so many sigmas from the norm they may as well be Toyota consultants from the 90s"

I am not catching the reference. Can you explain or link to something I can read. Are you talking about Kaizen?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma

He's not saying everyone will be successful, he simply means there's nothing innately special about people who are successful and you shouldn't rule yourself out because you don't think you're [insert adjective here] enough. You need to be a moderately smart person who works hard, follows the right formula and gets a little lucky. You might still fail but it's definitely worth a shot.

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