And also be extremely lucky.
--R.W. Hamming
Also - if Harvard is a great school - how the F does someone find time to do the work and make a product at the same time?
When I did Engineering, I didn't have time to take a shower.
MySpace was limited in features, and a fugly interface.
Neither had talented people.
Zuck started at Harvard. That was his core user base. The Ivy League. Basically marquis 'customers' in social.
Think of how massively that affected recruiting and attention? The network effect of Ivy League x 1000. It would have been trivial for him to get investment.
But in the end - forget culture - the basic features were just better, and for every great feature, there are 'smart things' happening internally that are good. Zuck deserves credit for that.
I used to work a little bit with MySpace. Their culture was 'LA Cool Kid' i.e. 'The Standard' hang-out types.
They reminded me of a Record Label - totally hip - totally useless. I feel sorry for any Engineer that had to work at MySpace.
If you knew the culture at Lycos, Excite etc. - and compare it to Google, it's a little bit of a similar story.
It reminds me of how Google won the search engine war by delivering a more streamlined, less exploitative product.
And then of course there were a couple innovations that neither MySpace or Friendster had: photos with tags of your friends, and the concept of the News feed. It's hard to imagine a social network without those features, but they didn't exist before Facebook introduced them.
Friendfeed was launched October 2, 2007 and acquired 2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed
MySpace started out as a way for bands in LA to post gigs.
So their initial user-base/NDA was musicians, LA culture.
Facebook was a little more academic/ivy league.
It's hard to change one's genes :)
I spent way too much time worrying about grades. I'm not sure it mattered. It would have been just as good (and probably more enjoyable) to be a B-student with awesome side projects rather than an A-student with none.
(And often, esp. for college, one doesn't even need to make that trade-off when homework is largely immaterial, and your grade only depends on exams.)
Sure, luck may have played a large role in Facebook's initial success. But that was over 10 years ago. Many companies experience that initial success and then go nowhere, e.g. MySpace. Facebook, on the other hand, has continuously surpassed everyone's expectations. It's not until recently that people have began to accept that Facebook is here to stay. Discounting Facebook's repeated successes as luck is just silly.
Building a $350B company does not happen from luck, it requires a constant stream of good decision making.
I don't want to discount merit or work, but we too often seriously discount luck. Luck plays a large part in every success. That's not to say that people are justified in being unsuccessful; it's just to recognize that we're all involved in something larger than ourselves.
As failure doesn't always correlate to incompetence, success doesn't always correlate to competence.
I am not trying to lessen his feat but just saying that luck is a big part of it.
I say this as someone who got in (eventually chose to attend a different school for a variety of reasons) and with many friends who went there.
At Harvard, the primary thing you do is the extracurricular in your field of interest - whether that's law, activism or startups - is up to the individual student. Your grades, your education and your brand in society - Harvard takes care of that.
Looking back at college it was easily 80% worrying about doing work and 20% actually doing it. With something like programming, knowing how to use a debugger, profiler and an IDE give you a huge leg up. Easily 95% of CS students never take the time to learn the tools b/c you have to do it on your own time - but you have other homework to stress out about.
If it was purely based on luck, without any talent involved, you'd expect billion dollar companies to be more evenly distributed, and not cluster among certain individuals.
This factor alone accounts for a large percentage of repeat successes. Square probably never would have obtained the capital necessary to become competitive, had it not been for Twitter.
But honestly, for all their funding, even most of these second tries turn out to be failures. What you're really doing here is confusing selection bias with skill: take a pool of enough entrepreneurs, and eventually, just by chance, you'll find someone who has repeat successes.
There's only 170 companies on this list: https://www.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn-companies
The fact that there's even more than one company on it that has a repeat founder suggests that there's something more than selection bias going on her, given the sheer amount of startups started every year.
So the next thing we could do is take a look at if there's other correlations to these repeat founders besides their ability to get capital. I would argue that the fact that most of them are intelligent at least merits a look as a FACTOR that might help them.
I agree with you that talent is a thing. That said, the Matthew effect is also a thing. Winning tends to compound – partially because talented people are repeatedly successful, but even lucky untalented people can be repeatedly successful because of all the attention they get.
The example that's coming to my mind now is a little silly but – there are lots of funny people on Twitter who barely get any retweets, and there are moderately funny things said by popular people on Twitter who get tonnes of retweets and responses suggesting that they're the funniest people ever.
It takes a lot of work and/or luck (probably usually both) to get to the point where people just lap up everything you say, but once you're there, there IS a certain Halo effect of sorts.
Sorry if not water-tight, just rambling here
In the long run, luck and genius are probably both necessary but not sufficient; I have no doubt that Zuckerberg's a very smart guy, I just think there are many, many people just as smart who aren't billionaires.
I'm very much convinced that nearly everybody on this site who claims to want to make the world "a better place" just want to start their startup, earn their money and financial freedom, and tell themselves "they made the world a better place".
Snarky as fuck, yes indeed. I'm just beyond tired hearing all this bullshit, at least be honest with yourselves. If this does not apply to you, then it doesn't. If it does, please rethink your goals in life.
The most obvious way is direct through e.g. drugs. There's a very wide spectrum of potential futures here from nootropics to brave-new-worldesque soma.
The less obvious way is that technology alters your surroundings, which in turn influence your psychology.
Neither scenario seems particularly implausible to me.
This does contrast with pg's story, however.
This probably varies from person to person, but failing at something I care about would make me much more upset than failing at something I didn't really care about.
Alternative way of framing this: Any CEO who is personally responsible for generating most of the important features or business decisions in his company is incompetent at hiring and delegating
There is definitely luck in nature's random movements. But the entrepreneur small purposeful movements add up over time and overcome nature.