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Comment by jaegerpicker | Hacker News Reader

The part I think most people miss is that how "good" Zuckerberg is/was matters less than the resources he had access to. Luck/privilege account for SO much and that's true of all most all the billion $ startups.

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Agreed. It's often underplayed how helpful it was that Zuckerberg was at Harvard when he created Facebook. It created a sense of wanting to be a part of a network that once was exclusive as it expanded. I doubt he would have had the same type of advantage even if he was at another Ivy, like say Dartmouth.

It's often underplayed how helpful it was that Zuckerberg was at Harvard when he stole Facebook. FTFY.

The Winklevoss twins hired Zuckerberg to help build their social network. Instead Zuckerberg delayed their project while secretly building his own. He stole their market opportunity. It's well documented.

This is something that should be noted. Zuckerberg had access not only to university resources, but also a wealthy friend with deep pockets. I don't think that means success for everyone, but there are a lot more companies that would get off of the ground if cash flow wasn't a problem from day one.

What resources did he have access to besides being a Harvard student? That's a huge one, but it's not like he had access to (or needed) lots of resources to make The Facebook a success at Harvard. And after that it was all downhill.

A. being at Harvard, is a huge advantage in of itself. B. having a roommate with enough money to invest in it was a huge advantage. C. Being rich enough to attend a full time and not work a job to support him self.

There are a ton more to keep going on.

D. He had parents who indulged his interest in programming early on and hired a software engineer to privately tutor him E. Happened to have a group of friends (including Adam D'Angelo, later Facebook employee) at his VERY expensive private high school that were also great programmers by that point, likely helping each other become better.

I'm not saying the first versions of Facebook were ingenious feats of engineering, but Mark easily may have never learned to build things. Considering everything else mentioned in this thread, we can reasonably conclude that a lot of went very right for him at many points along the way.

He had the resource of being in the right place at the right time (i.e., market opportunity). Facebook did not exist at the time, and the social media market, which a college student could disrupt, wasn't saturated. What would he have started today? We can look at Airbnb or Uber as this decade's runaway success, but neither of those could have been started by a solo college student. Don't underestimate the power of luck in determining startup winners and losers.

Meanwhile, Dropbox could have been started by a solo college student. There only gets to be one Dropbox and it takes luck to be Drew Houston, but it takes an ungodly amount of work and sacrifice as well. We shouldn't lack acknowledgement of skill and drive anymore than we should underestimate luck.

There are lots of people with skill and drive not achieving the same results.

1. Being male

2. Being white

3. Being cis

4. Being straight

5. Being born in the US

You are not wrong, but Zuckerberg was competing against thousands of people with just as much privilege as himself (and some with a lot more). All of that same privilege didn't guarantee the Winklevoss twins success.

Obviously you can't have a billion dollar company if the country you live in uses a different currency.

The only one of those that has anything remotely approaching reality is being born in the US, or another first world country. Had he been born somewhere in undeveloped 3rd world, or somewhere torn apart by war, we likely would not be talking about him.

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