Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

> They would probably have much better opportunities as employees.

Nope. Nobody ever made a billion dollars working for someone else, but more to the point very few employees actually get to decide their own destiny. Imagine what Steve Wozniak's life would look like if he had never met Steve Jobs. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts he'd still be designing test equipment for some asshole boss. Arguably he ended up designing microcomputers for some asshole boss, but there were a few perks.

Plenty of people don't have the constitution or the inclination for entrepreneurship and that's fine, but they're never going to see a tenth of the opportunities as an employee than they would as an entrepreneur.

The obvious counterexample would be the likes of Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, but I think they're weak examples. PARC may have invented the WIMP interface, but it was Apple that changed the world with it. Alan Kay is a hell of a thinker and has been hugely influential, but he doesn't get to organise rock festivals or go Dancing With The Stars.

You assume that super smart people have money as their primary goal in life.

I have found this to be far from true. The truly brilliant people I know follow their passions, and usually make just enough money to do so, spending the rest of their energy on their actual passions.

Even if your ratio is right, that they get only a tenth of the opportunities as entrepreneurs... they tend to land the right ones, make the correct one, and be very satisfied with their lives.

> The truly brilliant people I know follow their passions, and usually make just enough money to do so, spending the rest of their energy on their actual passions.

This sounds suspiciously like No True Scotsman

Are there any truly brilliant people for whom money (in some abstract, score-keeping sense) is their passion? You could argue this for Warren Buffet, who isn't crazy about spending a lot of money but is very serious about investing well.

You could also be super smart and also passionate about something that immediately leads to making lots of money--Steve Jobs, for instance, is undeniably passionate about the kinds of products Apple makes, and how well they make them.

That only works for a very narrow range of 'passions', namely those that don't require money to fulfil. Larry Ellison is the perfect example. He's passionate about sailing, so he buys the sixth largest yacht in the world and runs an America's Cup team. He's passionate about aviation, so he buys a fleet of fighter jets. He's passionate about medieval Japan, so he builds a piece of it for himself.

Thinking that money is just about money is a middle-class mistake. Money is capital, capital is power. Money is the lever with which you move the world. Money is how things get done.

The usual counterexample is academia, that a tenured academic has the freedom to pursue their discipline. That's not true and it hasn't been true for years. Most academics are under constant pressure to produce research and bring in funding.

You're right to say that you just need to make enough money to pursue your passions, but unless your passions are hopelessly mediocre, 'enough' has a lot of zeroes.

Just a fack check.

There is at least one person who have worked for others and becomes a billionaire because of that: Charles Simonyi. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi). But he is probably the only 1 in 6,697,254,041 human beings who achieve billionairehood by working for others.

And yes, he worked one time in Xerox PARC before Microsoft.

Yet from your link it says: "He now heads his own company, Intentional Software,[1] with the aim of developing and marketing his concept of intentional programming."

I was not talking about entrepreneurship, but "Nope. Nobody ever made a billion dollars working for someone else,".

But quite a few people made $20 million working for someone else. Unless you have a strong desire to be a Global Corporate Titan, you don't gain much utility going from $20 mil to $1 bil.

Rumor has it that several extremely early and important Googlers are billionaires, including Marissa Mayer and Jeff Dean. Same for Facebook.

Keyword: early. Those employees were also risking by joining a new company.

I would think the obvious one is Eric Schmidt

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