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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

Here's the thing: I don't believe that the second part is true.

I think your chances of getting an enormous cashout are more or less independent of whether you work sixteen-hour days. If you have a great product that people want and the skills to implement it, what's the real difference if you work eighty hours a week instead of forty? Maybe you get the first version written in half (or more likely two thirds) of the time? Big deal.

Sure, there are probably some cases on the margin where speed really matters. But I think that if your product isn't going to take off then working a bit harder won't make it to do, and if your product is going to take off then you can probably get away with eight hour days anyway.

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i didn't mean to imply a correlation there between work time and cashing out.

my point was more, you can be an entrepreneur and build a healthy business irrespective of things like raising funds or working 80 hour weeks.

This is true in some cases, but very not true in others. If you have a great product that people want and the skills to implement it, you have a great product that somebody else also has the skills to implement. If they're willing to push theirs on people, they'll take the market. This is especially bad if you're making a product that benefits from a large audience (e.g. anything with social features, things whose production can carry an economy of scale). You could become the Borders to their Amazon.

Sure, as I said there are cases on the margin, and those cases where you just happen to be working against a competitor who just happened to start working on the same problem at roughly the same time are most of 'em. I'm not convinced these sorts of scenarios are all that common, though. Most big success stories involve doing something that nobody else was doing.

According to my numbers derived ex anum I'd say that working twice as hard increases your chance of getting a big payout by... approximately ten percent.

How many big success stories involve people who weren't really working all that hard? Do you really believe that's a common scenario?

Even if they weren't working on it at the same time, as long as somebody's looking when you gain moderate success, you've got a competitor who can use your current work as R&D to catch up — and then they can outpace you if you're giving 30% fueled by pocket change and they're giving 100% with the resources of a millionaire. This might not mean death, but it does mean that falling backward into monumental success is extremely improbable. That's why people say lifestyle businesses are unlikely to yield huge rewards.

What if your software is better architected e:g programmed by people who ruthlessly avoid unnecessary complexity? It may be that a competitor with deep pockets wastes lots on an over-complex or vaguely/fuzzily designed competing product. OTOH, I suppose sadly they've got a lot more to spend on marketing and that is what may kill you.

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