Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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> The dirty little secret, is that success is rare as hell.

That's why I have serious respect for anybody that makes it work more than once, those are the real entrepreneurs. For the rest it really is mostly luck.

I've scored pretty good with my first 'real venture' and I can testify to how unbelievably hard it is to do it again. So far no success :) But that won't stop me from trying very hard.

One thing definitely has changed in the last 10 years, back in '95-'99 most things you put out on the web were operating in an almost competition free arena, some of the stuff we got away with back then we certainly wouldn't be able to do today. Users expectations are a lot higher than they used to be and there are a lot of parties on the lookout for good ideas so if you 'launch early' with an incomplete product you just might give someone the last bit of the puzzle they were still missing.

It's a tricky situation and there are no easy solutions to any of this.

That's why I have serious respect for anybody that makes it work more than once, those are the real entrepreneurs. For the rest it really is mostly luck.

I agree with your suspicion that luck is often involved. But twice- or even thrice-successful entrepreneurs might also be lucky as well as good. I think an anecdote about the great physicist Enrico Fermi is in order:

My [Carl Sagan's] favorite example [of the non sequitur fallacy] is this story, told about the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, newly arrived on American shores, enlisted in the Manhattan nuclear weapons Project, and brought face-to-face in the middle of World War II with U.S. flag officers: So-and-so is a great general, he was told. What is the definition of a great general? Fermi characteristically asked. I guess it's a general who's won many consecutive battles. How many? After some back and forth, they settled on five. What fraction of American generals are great? After some more back and forth, they settled on a few percent. But imagine, Fermi rejoined, that there is no such thing as a great general, that all armies are equally matched, and that winning battles is purely a matter of chance. Then the chance of winning one battle of one out of two, or 1/2; two battles 1/4, three, 1/8, four 1/16, and five consecutive battles 1/32 -- which is about 3 percent. You would expect a few percent of American generals to win five consecutive battles --- purely by chance. Now, has any of them won ten consecutive battles...?

(From The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan; http://tinyurl.com/yeprpx4)

The problem here is not that you can measure 'success' by looking at consecutive endeavours, you can.

The trouble is that it may not be an indicator of future success, in other words it may not be a good 'predictor'.

But it also doesn't mean that there is no qualitative difference between entrepreneurs. It's just very hard to put your finger on what makes the difference, to explain that difference in terms of things to do or not to do.

> That's why I have serious respect for anybody that makes it work more than once, those are the real entrepreneurs. For the rest it really is mostly luck.

See the recent article on survivor bias:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=768297

Sure, some of the 'survivors', especially the serial entrepreneurs will be there only because of a series of instances of having luck. But not all of them.

Some people really have an uncanny way of perceiving which business opportunities are good ones and which to stay away from.

I think a big part of the 'mystique' that hangs around successful people directly relates to that.

People hope that by adopting strategies or even mannerisms that worked before that they will somehow be able to 'copy success'.

This is analogous to an alien analyzing planet earth coming to the conclusion that people get rich here by sending their clothes to the dry cleaners, hiring maids and driving fancy cars.

Having a realistic goal for your business and a good plan on how to make money are not the way to 'score big', they're a way to create a business and slowly grow it to a success, this may take a decade or more, with added luck you can maybe do it faster.

But the bigger portion of the 'fast company' crowd isn't looking to building a business, they're looking at the 'exit' before they've gone through the door at the entrance.

This is - in my belief - also the reason why the scoring chances of people with high profile advisors are not significantly better than those without, and it is possibly why successful entrepreneurs would rather become investors than to prove themselves by starting another company and build it from the ground up.

Much easier to improve your chances by spreading the money that you would put into a single corporation (all your eggs in one basket) into many smaller ones and hope you pick up a winner.

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