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“Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

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Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#151

Post by shon »

gnulinux wrote: post #105
jollofricepeas wrote: post #20

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 a heartbreaking comment to read: > 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 u…

I disagree. I’ve also failed multiple times but achieved what for me is a satisfying level of success in the process.

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.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#152

Post by whartung »

shon wrote: post #134
bluefirebrand wrote: post #46

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.

>Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once. 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…

Just a comment on this. Congratulations on exiting with "life-changing money". But I think germane to this comment would be the order in which these companies were tried and succeeded or failed would be relevant.

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.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#153

Post by mvkel »

As most commenters here say, this is a dumb take, all due respect to Andrew.

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.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#154

Post by notahacker »

hash872 wrote: post #22
dvt wrote: post #3

Absolute cope in the twitter comments, and it's weird seeing this on HN, which (at least historically) was a pretty entrepreneur-friendly forum. Yes, we get it, Zuck and Gates and Jobs were "lucky." But that doesn't mean starting a business is like going to the race track, and this extreme oversimplification reminds me of equally-reductive positions (solipsism, nihilism, etc.) where zero knowledge is imparted, and th…

Agreed. If Jeff Bezos started over in a non-tech industry, with no money or previous connections, is the author arguing that his chances at being successful in say a garden supply or waste management company the same as any other person? That seems absurd. 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…

If Jeff Bezos started off in a garden supply or waste management company then his chances of being successful would be well above average, but his chances of being successful enough for anyone in HN to care about what he had to say would be the same zero as anyone else looking to operate in those industries. What he had to say about would probably be quite different too...

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#155

Post by Jensson »

mattbuilds wrote: post #115
AussieWog93 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've bootstrapped successfully three times, and have seen it from the other side. 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 t…

Any chance you could go a little more in-depth with what you mean? Why are the ideas so bad and what can someone who gets it recognize in them? Just curious.

Juicero for example. Most bad ideas stopped in the infancy stages, but some manages to find VC's who also don't get it and combined you get Juicero. There isn't something to get, its just really dumb ideas that aren't solving problems.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#156

Post by gonzo41 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #46
jollofricepeas wrote: post #20

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.

This! And also. Going to the right schools. Not having trouble with school. Being from a stable wealthy family etc etc.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#157

Post by deely3 »

twawaaay wrote: post #57

I work with some pretty successful people who started their companies. 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 bei…

> 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?

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#158

Post by dan-robertson »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #20

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…

I think it’s probably right that some people are better at running successful startups than others. They might be more willing to try / fail, have better ideas, etc, and it isn’t just stuff like having good connections to funding.

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.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#159

Post by tnel77 »

labrador wrote: post #7

I'm going to comment in a different direction: As someone who achieved great success at a young age (under 30) it is almost impossible for it not to go your head, mostly because everyone treats you like you are a genius. Unfortunately for me, I lived the adage that "pride goeth before the fall"

If I may ask, what happened?

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#160

Post by JamisonM »

bsder wrote: post #63
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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 ar…

"the Polgar sisters are proof that training is the key and not genetics"

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.

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