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Comment by yclept | Hacker News Reader

To give some idea of how small a 1M company is, a non-chain Mexican restaurant in the suburbs of Virginia was making 3M / year.

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On the other hand, it matters how many people are involved in the operation. A small two or three-person tech startup making a million dollars is different from a restaurant with thirty (? estimate) employees making a million dollars.

There were niche startup doing niche programming language (BASIC) with less revenue that ended up being Microsoft.

Is that an accurate comparison? Gates was born into weatlh and a pre-existing social network. His company's success has a foundation of winning the genetic lottery.

It's reasonably accurate. IMO, MS grew because of DOS.

They were hoping Gary Kildall's C/PM would be the OS for the IBM PC, and only leveraged DOS "to save the language business."

It's not clear how much of a factor Gates' parents' wealth and social network was in this process. Yeah, his Mom was on the board of IBM but Microsoft was an established brand already.

His company didn't spring into being without a history. He had access to educational and tutoring resources, specifically technology related resources, his entire life. I'd say it's very clear his parents' circumstances were a huge factor in his early successes, and arguably much more important than those successes were to later ones.

There are millions of people who are equally as lucky as Bill Gates in terms of family economic and social status. Luck plays a role but it is not the defining factor.

"Millions?" How do you figure? Gates was born well into the top 1%. Tens or hundreds of thousands is more accurate. Luck isn't the deciding factor, especially in what endeavors to pursue, but it is a prominent factor in the success of those endeavors.

Let's say you are right that he was born into the top 1% in the US. I am not confident that is true without data but let's say that is it for the sake of argument.

.01 * 330,000,000 = 3,300,000

So yes, millions. And yet there are only a handful of Americans like Bill Gates.

It's usually not easy to compare across industries, though. A software company with $1M revenue could easily end up with higher net profit than a restaurant with $3M revenue.

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