61–70 of 232 posts
This is stupid. 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 jus…
This is stupid. 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 jus…
Honestly it just looks to me like the lottery you won is not "having a successful business", but "having the luxury and connections to try and fail 5-7 times with one success" Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having disposable income and connections means much much more than genetics. This comment has the relevant quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35024721
Of course it does, the second paragraph in my original response states just that. This doesnt negate the fact that some people are exponentially better at business than others. Its the same in math, chess, basketball, football, writing, and every other human endeavor
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".
This is stupid. 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 jus…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly it just looks to me like the lottery you won is not "having a successful business", but "having the luxury and connections to try and fail 5-7 times with one success" Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.
Yeah, this is one of the things that drives me nuts about these "inspirational" stories where some millionaire/billionaire talks proudly about how their first business failed, their car was repo'd, bank foreclosed on them, etc... but I've never heard one talk about what they did between that and the successful business. Where did they sleep? How did they afford food?
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.
Pretty clear to me after meeting a number of very successful people in NYC/SF that some people "just have it". Meaning, they can identify opportunities that have a high probability of success and execute on those opportunities. There are absolutely personality types/genetic backgrounds where stumbling into 100M based on thinking of an idea is a real thing. Also, if someone went to a school like Stanford, its common f…
Your first sentence is selection bias. Of course, successful people look like they "just have it". Once you have succeeded, convincing investors to fund another opportunity is far easier. The real question is how to succeed in the first place. 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 sl…
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.
This is stupid. 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 jus…
What’s TAM?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this is one of the things that drives me nuts about these "inspirational" stories where some millionaire/billionaire talks proudly about how their first business failed, their car was repo'd, bank foreclosed on them, etc... but I've never heard one talk about what they did between that and the successful business. Where did they sleep? How did they afford food?
Varies but mostly you go get a job for a while.