“Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice
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Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous.
What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success.
The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff.
1. have a good team and hire right. you need just three roles: sales, operation and product.
2. TAM is real and will determine the size you can grow your business.
3. focus on sales first literally. as a founder you should do your own selling. take care of your customers!!!
4. don’t be a crook
5. manage your money right; be cheap.
6. grow where you’re planted. dig deep in areas you know or that your personal networks know.
7. be lucky - this is about timing and also putting yourself in a place to have information first or at least know the value of certain information first.
8. know you’re going to get it wrong sometime and fail; when that happens take a small break and then spin up another
I’ve bootstrapped two companies to success in my eyes which has changed me and my families life.
The first was in the 2000s out of college (~$500k annual) it eventually petered out then in the 2010s (~$5m annual). Now I’m going to do another and I hope to create a $5-10m company all off the advice of other entrepreneurs.
I’ve also failed miserably and had 5-7 business go under or never even really get off the ground.
I'm interpreting it as "The first was in the 2000s out of college (~$500k annual); it eventually petered out. Then [the second was] in the 2010s (~$5m annual)."
If you had a daily lottery but only 1000 people were able to enter it, by year 5 nearly everyone would have won the lottery at least twice.
Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.
We work jobs and do our thing on the side like most traditional American entrepreneurs do until their business gets off the ground.
Who the hell is bootstrapping businesses without a job besides rich kids?
1. Get a cheap apartment in a slightly sketchy neighborhood
2. Work 7-8 hours at work and every other waking hour on your business. Take meetings during lunch.
3. Focus to the point of cutting out sports, video games, bars and other frivolous shit until you’ve made progress. Don’t date if you can.
Discipline wins the race.
And when you fail; which you will.
Do it all over again until you find success.
A man/woman has a nice life, a cheap apartment in an okay neighbourhood. Their 9-5 job isn't particularly exciting or well-paid; however, at the weekend, it allows them to enjoy sports, video games and other frivolous activities, such as dating and hanging out with their partner or children.
A stranger approaches them and says they make a much better life for themselves. He tells them they just need to get a cheap apartment in a sketchy neighbourhood, work all waking hours of the day, and give up any fun until they make it. They may fail five times until they succeed and may be declared bankrupt.
After listening, they ask what their life looks like after they make it. He answers it allows them to have an okay apartment in a more expensive neighbourhood, and they can enjoy sports, video games and other frivolous activities, such as dating and hanging out with their partner or children.
They smile at the stranger, and say "But I already have most of this right now". The stranger walks off wearily.
I was confusing it with a man sitting below an olive tree, maybe a variant of the fisher one.
This is life.
Life is inequality.
Not everyone is meant to be an entrepreneur or has the desire to do what it takes to become one.
Trying to convince someone to become an entrepreneur is like trying to convince someone to become a professional athlete or musician.
You must sacrifice frivolity for excellence.
But excellence can always dabble in frivolity.
The choice is ours to make.
For which you may have to be somewhat lucky
So in the context of bootstrapping a company it’s helpful to have a legit fallback (way to suck it up and find an OK job) when things don’t pan out.
Edit: maybe this is obvious for CS/software folks but the extracurricular work I’m involved with is not exactly tech related, though my day job is coding
Maybe at least one of their parents had a sofa.
The trick is to have parents who aren't homeless.
Few paths go straight from a to b without a misstep.
This. “It's not what you know its who you know.” Though often the people who give that advice privately are the most invested in maintaining the illusion of meritocracy publicly.
[X] "The trick is to have parents",
[ ] who are alive,
[ ] "who aren't homeless",
[ ] who have housing that is safe and functional,
[ ] who have room for you not already occupied by other family members in greater need,
[ ] who "had a sofa",
[ ] or if they're dead, at least left you with enough money as an equivalent
(Also, you forgot people whose parents are able-but-unwilling. This also sometimes makes some things harder than they would be, compared to, say, being given fistfulls of cash each weekend by your rich parents who have a sofa AND a bed.)
To the original post, I generally agree. There are some fundamental lessons about business you can learn, and if you follow them, have a better chance of success. But the magnitude of that success largely comes down to luck. There's plenty of thought leaders out there that just happened to join the right company at the right time. Much of their success is "beta" rather than "alpha", but they are treated like they have unique insight to drive amazing outcomes.
Elon Musk cleaned out manure tanks for a while in Canada if I'm not mistaking. There are some interviews where he talks about this (and showering at the gym across the street and sleeping under a desk and having no money) in quite some detail.
The story of how he even got to own the mine sounds pretty wild:
“According to the story, in the mid-1980s, Errol and a copilot landed their plane near Lake Tanganyika in Zambia, where "a group of Italians" offered them 80,000 pounds in British currency in order to buy the plane.
Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?
"I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."”
It proceeds to say he made about $400000 from the mine in total - hardly a billionaire villain level money.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
I think the null hypothesis that Musk got lucky in the dotcom era is pretty reasonable, lots of people did. I don’t get all the conspiracy theories.
Just to clarify for anyone else wondering, that’s 400,000USD inflation adjusted for 2021. Converted to South African rand, it’s about 7.2 million.
To put that in context, the average home price in South Africa is about a million rand. So at most they would have been able to buy 7 properties. If they bought in an expensive area, they likely would have only been able to afford 4 or 5.
> To put that in context, the average home price in South Africa is about a million rand. So at most they would have been able to buy 7 properties
That’s... not how averages work.
(If the minimum price was a million rand, then 7 would be the maximum.)
It's easier to take risks when you have an out when it all goes really wrong. Doubt he'd still be cleaning manure today if he hadn't had a success...
"But still you'll never get it right/'Cause when you're laying in bed at night/Watching roaches climb the wall/If you called your dad he could stop it all."
> Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?
> "I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."
https://www.news24.com/news24/bi-archive/how-elon-musks-fami...
> Chasing "Get Rich Quick" schemes is not typically a sign of wealth.
I've found it to be pretty common. The amount of dumb money seeking 'easy' ways to multiply flowing around silicon valley kind of defines the place.
Just take smaller risks. I built my first business over nights and weekends and didn’t quit my day job for 5 years.
If you want something bad enough you just have to take the chance.
I worked for a startup before my current job where the founders - two brothers - had connections with the governor of a state in the Midwest to get a grant to start a small health care company. Neither of them were technical. They hired a few people in the state as basically QA and then hired a full stack consulting company that did the design, the project management and the development by hiring cheaper labor from India.
Then when they started getting enough revenue, they started bringing the technical skills in house including hiring a very good CTO.
The CTO then hired me as his third technical hire to oversee the “cloud application modernization” initiatives because they wanted to sell access to their micro services to large health care providers.
They sold the company three years after I was hired for 10x revenue. It was only $30 million. But the founders and the CTO I assumed made out well.
I think the people who had been there the longest made in the low six figures. I left ten months earlier and didn’t exercise my options. I might have left about $60K on the table.
Please play the worlds smallest fiddle for me. My next job after leaving the 60 person company was a remote job working at $BigTech in the cloud consulting department where my two year prorated signing bonus was $nice.
So stop comparing yourself to other people. Nobody starts at the same place.
For every trust funder with a garage but in Atherton, there are 10 other trust funder with substance abuse problems doing nothing with their life
I can respect people that play their cards, I dont resent people that had a better hand
I think it is up to everyone else to recognize the barriers to entry. In feudal society everyone knew that.
If $45 per month is unachievable then what on Earth are you doing with your money?!
That’s not true in my experience. I’m a similar case, have started 8 businesses in 30 years. Most have had some level of success: enough pay my employees and provide good healthcare while also making a (often small) profit. I’ve also had 2 exits, one of which generatied a life-changing amount of money for my co-founder and myself. Of the 6 business that did not exit, 2 failed to start, 2 achieved multi-million dollar revenue levels then failed, 2 somewhere in the middle.
In between startups I worked for other companies. I tried to optimize $/hr while I did, rebuilding my reserves and even my credit (lost everything once)
Working for others after a failed startup has many benefits. You look at company leadership differently. You observe. You learn. You make more connections. You see more market opportunities. You get inspired. You try again.
Probably key in being able to do this cycle well is to not let the businesses get over leveraged. I’ve had both funded and non-funded businesses. I’ve gone nearly broke a couple of times but a big part of learning to be an entrepreneur is learning to manage money.
I assume your first venture was not the "life-changing money" venture, and the impact of when that did happen certainly can change the narrative of the rest of the businesses in regards to risk taking, particularly if it was not the last venture that was greatly successful.
How much money are people sinking into micro-SaaS in 2023?
If you live in a cheap place, get a decent job, then you can save money which you can use to start a business.
It costs literally $50 to get a LLC from your local Secretary of State or equivalent. You can do it yourself…like tomorrow.
Your chances of making it to Elon Musk status are slim, but there’s literally no excuse in America to not spin up an LLC by tomorrow, get a free EIN, open a bank account for FREE, throw up a landing page and start interacting with potential customers…
…in literally days.
That’s how you do it!
If I follow the "scratch your own itch" advice I ultimately fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a better register allocation algorithm for 6502 C compilers.
If I follow the "put yourself in the future and build that" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a library capable of guaranteed constant-time computation.
If I follow the "build products for your niche hobby community" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a better than state-of-the-art comb filter designed for NTSC laserdiscs.
If I follow the "capitalize on new trends in tech" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. an ML model trained to invert audio cassette dub generational fidelity loss.
How do you figure out what people want when you're very, very, very different from most people?
It's a scary leap to make, but if you can pay some bills following your passion, making things you need to build, then I'd call that a win.
You had 2 of 9 businesses succeed. You are demonstrating roughly 1:5 odds of rolling a successful business.
With 1:5 odds if we reroll you doing 10 businesses over and over, 10% of you never succeed. About 1/3 of you win once, 1/3 of you win twice, and 20% of you win 3 times.
The versions of you that won 3 times are not any different than the versions of you who won never. Any advice you give is neither more accurate because a version of you won 3 times nor less accurate because a version of you won never.
If you do everything badly (i.e. come up with bad business ides, cannot implement even those bad ideas, are bad at hiring, managing money, paying taxes etc.) then your success rate will be 0%, not 20%.
The issue here isn't about how hard starting a business is. It's obviously hard enough that many (most?) people who try will fail.
The issue is: can you do things better? Is doing things better lead to higher probability of success?
The "it's all luck" people say that you can't. There is no better or worse way. It's just luck. Therefore any advice is useless.
The opposite point of view is: yes. There are better and worse ways of doing things. And if you know what they are then you can tell other people. And that advice will help them to achieve success. But not guarantee.
Some people may be able to increase their chances, but maybe not everyone.
Does 2 out of 9 successful startups mean your tenets listed here will lead to your level of success 22% of the time? Or do they only lead to success 0.022% of the time and you're the 1 out of 5000? How do you know?
It's not just this topic, it's a problem with general advice humans give to other humans without applying any specific context.
Which is quite the statistic when you think about it.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2022-economic-we...
Also agree that it depends on your goals! I've done venture capital deals, self funded deals ("lifestyle"), non-profit & political campaigns, etc - and different stages and goals.
Obviously YMMV: I know people who legit get lucky and then their luck runs out, and I know smart guys who do everything right and can't catch a break.
It's also fun to angel invest. Get to see dozens more companies from (a bit) of the inside.
Was your first successful business one of your first ones? What if it had taken you until your 6th try to get a winner? Would you have stuck it out?
It is clear that given the dimensions of skill and luck, the most success will come from having both. If you lack either skill or luck, you will automatically be at a disadvantage compared to those who have both. This implies that the most prominent success stories are the result of luck as much as of anything else. However that isn’t very often mentioned in those stories.
And yes I’m far away from a new college grad.
No I didn’t do it. But I have 25 years of experience in the industry and was able to get a remote role via a slight pivot.
> Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous.
> I’ve also failed miserably and had 5-7 business go under or never even really get off the ground.
This means that you incurred (2+) / ((2+) + (5-7)) chance of creating a successful business. This is in the spirit of the OP. Creating a business may involve some skill, but ultimately it's just a lottery. Sometimes you win only because you're lucky. Or something you lose only because you're unlucky. I apologize but I truly do think giving advise like this can be dangerous. Not everyone is as privileged and maybe a single failure can put them in life-long debt, or financial trouble, or homelessness.
As a ratio I’ve failed a lot more than I’ve won but it is not a lottery.
It’s more like a golf game, it’s hard to do well but you do learn and improve with each attempt.
Most people will never even have the opportunity to afford one lottery ticket.
The lottery idea works in the sense that I was born in the U.S. rather than a developing country AND my parents, who were far from rich or even stable at times still were able to afford a family computer (thank you Atari 520ST) which was very fortunate since my formal education ended the 3rd time I was expelled from high school.
Yes, from the life perspective, as opposed to a worst-case (even in the U.S) I most certainly am privileged and lucky, and did certainly win a lottery of sorts. You’re absolutely correct.
Having said that, most of us that work in tech have won that same or a similar lottery.
Life, location, family, stability, yes those things are a bit of a lottery.
But not so for startups. Your odds of winning the lottery never increase. Your odds of winning in business do, as long as you learn from your failures.
It may not be precisely a lottery, but if most of the successful people are “I’ve failed a lot more thab I’ve won”, then, the ability to afford to fail a lot more than you win.
Especially with the narratives where the failures involve periods of homelessness, etc., possibly mitigate by couch-surfing or other network support—having a network that mitigates in that way is fortune. Surviving homelessness without it in a way that lets you to buy another totally-not-a-lottery-ticket at business? Even more a matter of fortune.
9. If when you pitch your original idea to potential customers, if they're not over the moon about it your destined for failure.
You have to make absolute certain that you remember to do this step and to do it correctly, as well as at the right time, or it won't work.
I think there are three keys to the problem: 1) readers want feel-good success stories, 2) successful people strongly benefit from positive PR, and 3) people often can't usefully talk about why they succeeded.
The first, I think, is pretty obvious. The Hero's Journey long predates modern capitalism, but it very much gets applied. On top of that, add that readers want to feel positive, powerful, smart, enabled. So you can't just tell them, "Sure, you'd like to be rich like this guy, but take it from me, you're fucked from the get-go." There's a good critique of the corporate bio that relates: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/02/11/jeff-john-ro...
The second bit means that business heroes are not going to tell you, here's my secret: be born at least moderately wealthy and well connected. They aren't going to tell you that past a certain levehttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-... of wealth, it's basically impossible to go broke. They're instead going to make themselves seem both extraordinary and extra ordinary. See, e.g.: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-...
And the third is something I'm sure many here have experienced. I started coding as a child, the son of a software developer. When people ask me how to get started as a developer, the honest answer is: I have no fucking idea. I have little recollection of how I learned, and I have no idea whether the parts that were easy for me would be easy for anybody else. I'll be positive and encouraging and give vague general advice. But if I talked about what worked for me, it would be very much in the vein of "here's the lottery ticket number I used", because my path was so personal.
Apropos the article, it’s easy to imagine there’s a similar lottery for most paths in life, including entrepreneurship. “Be born rich enough that you have the innate confidence that the universe will bend to your will” is a lottery I didn’t win.
Surely, a kernel of the current political polarization is the left’s insistence that these lottery tickets matter, and the right’s insistence that the wealth they’re holding is the result of their own hard work. (To be clear, it’s a spectrum — tickets come in different sizes, and hard work plays a role — but such nuance has no place in public discourse)
…
I’ve also failed miserably and had 5-7 business go under or never even really get off the ground.
All other things being equal, I’d expect someone who started 8 businesses and had one mild and one moderate success to have more useful insights to offer than someone who started one business and had it become wildly successful. Yet our culture valorizes the latter to extreme extents.
Perhaps that was what “awinkinson” was trying to get at with his pithy comment on that terrible platform.
I think it could still be true that the advice isn’t very good but not for the reason the tweet gives (I agree the tweet is stupid). In particular, I think there could be a lot of tacit things that aren’t really expressed in advice, especially the ‘startup influencer’ types who give out advice on twitter. For example, it might be that being really good at hiring and having people work on the right thing is a key skill and a successful founder might think they just walked around the office and asked obvious questions without being able to write down what exactly it was they did to steer the company in the right direction.
I wander how many of those “successful” startups will be successful when they can’t spend years living off of VC funding?
Also, if someone went to a school like Stanford, its common for them to raise 5M in funding with nothing. From there, they can try for a few years with a decent chance at coming up with something, raising more money, pulling money off the table in round B, and then basically getting rich with no innovation at all. There are all these payoffs that exist from being in a certain class of prestige
This comment has the relevant quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35024721
Even those that you assume "just have it" most likely just have enough means and connections to try and fail and eventually succeed than most of us.
Citing chess directly contradicts your thesis about "innate talent".
In chess, the Polgar sisters are proof that training is the key and not genetics. The increasing existence of younger and younger chess grandmasters distributed around the world also shows that it's more about training than "innate talent".
Football and basketball do have a "innate talent" component--at the highest levels the competitors are genetic freaks.
However, any human endeavor not relying on pure physicality does not have "innate talent" limitations. "Talent" is almost always correlated to "early training" and "hard work".
Look, I don't have a dog in this fight but the idea that the Polgars "prove" that training is more important that genetics doesn't make sense. Evidence maybe, "proof" is just a silly assertion.
They were all born at different times and had different experiences and have different genes!
Here on HN folks are always going on about genes with confident assertions but the number of people that understand the difference between "heritability" and "genetics" seems to be very small.
"Football and basketball do have a "innate talent" component--at the highest levels the competitors are genetic freaks."
This is not a thing you have actual evidence for, and there are players at the highest levels of these sports that don't fit the mould of what you would expect it takes to succeed - it is too broad an assertion.
Having the right connections helps in getting funding. If you went to Stanford, your network would have many connections that are able to invest 5M. If you are raised in the slums, you are far less likely to have these connections, regardless of your genetic background or personality.
Some people just don't get it. They have ideas that are so bad someone who "gets it" wouldn't even conceive of it as a possibility - the way that someone with Asperger's does unimaginably dumb things in social situations.
Unlike Asperger's, though, people that think this way aren't a tiny minority with a diagnosed disorder but ~70% of the population.
All of the successful startups I've seen sounded like they could be successful. And every idea I've heard that sounded like it wouldn't be successful hasn't been.
Having a good business plan is no guarantee of success, but having a bad one will guarantee failure.
The overall experience was still very worthwhile - what I learned about that side of things made me a better engineer, and I have a newfound respect for people who are good at the business side of things.
It would be easy for me to chalk it up to bad luck or not having the right privilege or whatever, but that just would be sour grapes.
As with everything in life, hard work can make up for lesser talent or bad luck, great talent can make up for a lack of effort, and being lucky is sometimes better than either.
Its funny how similar it is from the methodology perspective to programming despite it being about a completely different spectrum of skills.
Yeah, I very much doubt it and I would bet a whole bunch of $$$ that there is no genetic basis, only a background/privilege correlation with some Gaussian noise. Do you have any papers to back up your claim? Or is this all anecdotes of "meeting people in NYC/SF"? We all meet people in NYC/SF but I see no such trend, I only see already rich people investing in things to get even richer.
Often this is "two and twenty" (aka 2% annual carry, plus 20% of the gains). Pretty awesome skimming.
(I worked for a VC until end of last year; still years of waiting to see if the carry I vested will pay out anything at all)
>Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
>Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
>Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
>Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
Youre saying that if you only consider the rich, then there's no difference between the rich and poor experience for making businesses
Um... the parent comment is in fact talking about that
The thing about not being able to make rent is that other things suffer — like being able to move to another city or, you know, eating.
I think it's much more likely that people who are too poor to participate cannot participate in gainful labour in a predictable fashion, i.e. their employment is sporadic, or shifts are unpredictable, or they are seasonal labour. i.e. they are not time-constrained, they are employment-constrained.
18% of households in the US say they can't afford home internet service: https://ntia.gov/blog/2022/switched-why-are-one-five-us-hous...
Seems like you're just trying to grandstand.
very hardly believable, unless they are chronically unemployed.
Corollary: Nearly every "overnight success" happens 'overnight', sure. But the 'overnight' period is after decades of slogging it out in the trenches of obscurity. The ability to freely take risks with life with high potential payoffs is partly attitude, and partly being able to get up on the high wire with a net underneath, so you can try again until you succeed. Many end up succeeding without really knowing why, or noticing that they had the net to keep trying until they did.
You might just be lucky, period, and still succeed. (Lightning does strike. ha, great name for a horse.)
But your chances are FAR better if you are well prepared, know the stats, know the jockeys, have inside info on what a horse has been fed, maybe even that morning, and so on. You might be able to rig things in your favor via inside connections.
But even with all your "skills" lined up, you still need luck and lots of it.
I think what I'm taking issue with is your statement that winning at the race track is _mere_ luck. No, like being a successful entrepeneur, it also requires lots of preparation.
Twitter by its nature is reductive. The position of the author here should really be read as: I know the other 5 lotto numbers. (baseline for a chance at success.) Now here is the 6th number, the random and lucky part that I'm taking credit for and that won't be reproducible by you.
Gambling is zero sum.
Businesses, even failed ones, generally do some positive things along the way.
Learning to do things that are useful and getting paid for them is really different from learning some useless information that happens to help you win at the expense of others.
Anyway, to be clear, this isn't the point I was arguing. Whether zero sum vs positive sum, where any benefit might lie (value to society, or to anyone at all) is not my point. It's that skill is clearly involved in both activities, as well as a large luck factor. Not only did I not like the race track analogy, I found the critical reading of the tweet to be too narrow to be useful.
For the record and again, I generally agree with your comment. But as a reply to my own, I think you went off base from my argument.
If entrepreneurs have no useful advice then there's no right or wrong way to structure or run a company, it's all random and any method will do. Just generalizing from other fields of study we know this isn't true anywhere else, so why would it be true for running a business?
Winning at horses is much lower variance, is easier to learn, and depends enormously less on accidents of upbringing and social class. VC has historically been a fallback for people who couldn’t hack it in proper finance, and while that’s a little unfair, it’s only a little unfair.
Zappos Founder Tony Hsieh Surrounded by Drugs and Nitrous Oxide Cartridges in Fatal Fire
https://www.thewrap.com/zappos-founder-tony-hsieh-surrounded...
Edit: I journaled about it recently, which I'll share in case in helps anyone:
I wasn't awake when I was younger. Like in the 80's when I suddenly made a lot of money. I didn't go to the beach and sit on a bench on a pier to think about it. What does this mean? How is this going to change my life? What do I have to do to manage a lot of money? What are my responsibilities to family that are still be struggling? That's what I mean when I say I was asleep. I was asleep in the ignorance of my youth. I did not have situational awareness. My self-awareness was low.
Bottom line: I grew up without much money. Since I was successful I thought I was smart enough to figure out how to handle a lot of money. Turns out, managing money is a skill that I don't have and wasn't going to figure out because it didn't interest me, so you know the saying "A fool and his money are soon parted"
I just want to add, when you are born in the upper classes and you strike it rich, people around you will recommend you get a wealth manager and hand you business cards. That doesn't happen when you are working class. Your friends and family are equally clueless.
I think this is tricky - advice can be reproducible within a limited environment, but still be fragile. For example, extremely risky real estate investing can work within a market cycle. But if you try to bridge cycles without consolidation, you're going to be in for a bad time.
People typically don't explain their success with "just after I opened the pickaxe shop, the gold rush started". Even if that is a major factor in their success, they will explain their success coming from other factors, like waking up at 5 am to listed to podcasts while running on the treadmill.
(The advice that you should wake up at 5 am and listen to podcasts on the treadmill is reproducible, but timing the pickaxe shop opening with the gold rush is not reproducible. You hear one as the advice, not the other. This makes it difficult to follow your advice "When the advice hinges on a unique set of circumstances that you can't reproduce, then they are likely giving you their lottery ticket. Otherwise you might want to listen more closely.")
this is a funny quip, and it is completely recognizable as a quip.
Feeling the need to defend entrepreneurs against this quip is a defect in you. Feeling the need to analyze what %age of the time this quip would need to be true in order for it to be acceptable marks you as a complete nerd who misses the forest for the trees. Wanting to burden this quip with extra words so as to make it quantifiably good advice is misunderstanding what makes something funny.
have a laugh, go on about your day, this quip was never meant to be flypaper for humorless gadflies.
Skill is reproducible. A successful entrepreneur can tell you what skills they have found useful in their successes. You can look at a bunch of businesses and figure out what skills are necessary. Luck is not reproducible. Far too many entrepreneurs discount their luck or lack the ability to recognize and analyze it.
A key takeaway I've kept with me this whole time is the idea of there being two kinds of creative advice: (1) how to buy more lottery tickets, and (2) how to win the lottery. The former is useful, the latter not so much.
[1] Wait, 9 years ago? That can't be right.
Some luck is still required.
I can tell you, the sentence is pure BS.
Successful people may not know why exactly they got successful. Or they may not understand how much what they do contributed to the outcome. But they certainly tend to be sharp people putting a lot of hard, HONEST work and doing a lot of things right.
Even if you could say it was luck, think in terms of being the kind of person that creates a lot of chances for luck and prepares so that when they get lucky they do most out of it.
It is a bit like a person who never bought a lottery ticket complaining the other one won. After playing it every day.
Don't be salty. Try to understand what successful people do that makes them successful. Just because they can't explain it well doesn't mean there isn't wisdom to be had.
Luck?
Telling people that the success is just blind luck is offensive, IMO.
Not that successful people care.
Basically I think it is a bit arrogant to "know" it, but also it is quite pessimistic not to think and talk about these as successful serial-entrepreneurs have a lot to say that has merit.
It does take skill to build something, but having the ability to learn that skill is a 'chance', which is in the realm of luck.
Neither being lucky nor skilled is enough for success, it's the combination of both. And here I leave 'success' as loosely defined.
You can't get lucky at the lottery unless you participate in it.
Skill is due to luck and subsequent luck in some area is due to skill.
I just mentioned above - luck comes first, skill is the ability to get lucky at something.
Enough luck negates the need for skill
I've started four startups with two exists and two failures. In every cases there were deals that, if they had come through, would have have pushed the startups to huge success. There were were also deals that, if they had not happened, would have killed that startup.
If you are skilled, you prepare. You plan contingencies. You are ready to take advantage of any opportunity that comes, but after that, a lot is outside of your control and comes down to luck.
The line between success and failure is often razor thin, but the world does not see it that way.
If you are an inch over the line you are a success; a role model. You are expected to share the secret to your success. If you are an inch behind the line, well maybe you had better go work for someone else and let the successful people talk.
Many successful founders give terrible advice, and many failed founders have fantastic insights.
I get it. /r/workreform, the managers are taking all the money and only make tps reports. But surely not every place needs to be like this.
Entrepreneurship is 80% an emotional journey. Getting advice from other entrepreneurs about the emotions of starting and running a company is incredibly helpful. Nobody else -could- give that advice.
There is no formula, no one way of doing it. If there was there would be no entrepreneurs. Banks and large companies would just do the “thing” that always works and reliably produce successes over and over again.
All the chaos and trial and error of entrepreneurship exists because every market “hole” is a unique bit of problem domain that can only be filled by a unique solution.
When an entrepreneur tells you how they did it, their advice may not be transferable to anything other than their niche. It’d be like a fish giving advice to a mountain goat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw
brutally hilarious
However, that doesn't mean you should do everything a successful startup founder mentions in their retrospectives. Founding a successful startup does not equate to having a flawless perspective into what caused your success. It's the job of VC firms to study startups and figure out what works and what doesn't, not founders.
Maybe the chances are still quite low if you do everything really well, and maybe an entrepreneur giving advice is likely to massively overestimate that, driving the sentiment behind this tweet. But they're certainly higher than if you do everything really poorly.
In the UK the leadership pretty much all come from the same stock on both sides of the fence, private schools etc, to be in high business/politics you're pretty much raised for your job.
You cannot become someone else. You cannot be where someone else was, when someone else was. And even if you can, it may not be the right place and the right time for you, as much as it was for someone else. Success cannot be copied.
I really hate these "12 steps to becoming successful" recipes. It's well know phenomena that people tend to unrealistically attribute success to their personal traits and not luck. Success needs skills and knowledge, but also some luck. I doubt successful people really know why are they specifically are successful unlike hundreds of their competitors.
This does not mean best practices do not exist. They do and they work. Only they work statistically. You may follow all best practices in the world and still fail miserably.
I only give the context in case people think the author is some bitter, failed startup founder.
[0] https://seekingalpha.com/news/3926662-wecommerce-agrees-to-c...
The people you hire, there is no sure thing they can build it properly. The marketing effort, no sure shot. Absolutely every decision you make involves some luck
First order, every number is equally (un)likely and there is no harm in choosing yesterday’s number, because it is nevertheless no more unlikely today than any other.
Second order, you want to avoid split pots, so doing what others are doing reduces EV… your number should be as random as you can make it… and any lottery that actually produced the same numbers twice in a short period of time would be subject to increased scrutiny, which must also be factored in (you might get no prize if it is discovered, even if the conclusion were untrue, that the lottery were rigged) so yesterday’s numbers actually are objectively bad choices.
Either way, the metaphor stands quite well.
Every idea for a business isn't equal. A good idea, combined with good leadership, and good execution, will 'beat the odds' the majority of the time.
Honestly, that this is all there is to the post, and that it was a tweet, just adds to the rediculous of the statement. Just spewing unfounded opinions with no evidence onto a platform that encourages short easily digestible posts.