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Comment by joejohnson | Hacker News Reader

This community seems to need constant validation that it's worth doing start-ups and that some are, in fact, successful. I have to feel like if this were true, there wouldn't be this gaping insecurity.

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I think it's more that it's the people who are on the fence about doing a startup that are likely to be on a startup-focused forum talking about it. The ones who know it's a good idea are out there founding companies. And the ones who know it's a bad idea are at their 9-5 jobs and don't pay any attention to the startup scene.

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by math.

(Edit: BTW, Drew & Aston used to be regular posters on Hacker News, as did drusenko of Weebly, coffeemug of RethinkDB, lacker of Parse, danielha of Disqus, aaroniba of Etherpad, and a bunch of other YC founders I've forgotten. When they realized it was a good idea to start a company, they quit posting, got into YC, and started building their companies.)

> The ones who know it's a good idea are out there founding companies.

This is really really really true.

What about people who are actively founding a company, work a 9-5 job, and still post on HN? Are we just nuts, or what? :-)

I would say yes and no. Bootstrapping in itself is not a bad thing I don't think, but at the same time, if you want to succeed with your venture, you have to fully commit at some stage.

Actually, I asked more to learn about which Show HNs became successful. I was curious if I could detect any common differences the startups themselves that posted on HN in their infancy, as opposed to the total pool of startups or the total pool of Show HNs overall. (Of course, as someone pointed out, there's also the fact that startups who posted Show HNs are going to be much more likely to have gone through an incubator like Y Combinator. That may be a distinct enough difference that it washes out anything else about their initial product or submission. Still, I can't imagine EVERY success from Show HN was a result of subsequently doing Y Combinator...)

On a more selfish note, I also figured that people discussing this would cause me to learn about more interesting companies with ties to HN that I hadn't heard of before.

There are likely many successful startups which did a Show HN, but the cause of their successes have nothing to do with HN feedback, while highly valuable from a peer-to-peer perspective. They went on to find thousands of customers on their own. How they did this, and who championed them, is a different story.

I am interested in seeing the early stage. Just look at the Dropbox post and comments, it is incredible!

I probably would have dismissed Dropbox if I had seen that, and look at them now.

I hope this becomes a big list so I can read them all.

Isn't the lottery the same way? The odds of a doorbusting success are rather low, so even though success does happen, you don't always see it often.

Pretty much. For every project that makes it, thousands die off in the new section mostly unnoticed, let alone on the homepage. Probably have a better chance getting struck by lightning.

You have reminded me of the guy in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, who got struck by lightning for 7 times. Pessimism never helps.

which is why incubators lower the odds of failure and have mobs of people trying to get in. another validation of the lottery scenario is that even smart people keep launching companies, trying to find the one which catches the invisible wave. invisible wave = launching at the right time + getting lots of enduring love.

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