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Comment by gutnor | Hacker News Reader

This is the problem with all the success stories like Jobs and other billionaire. They all took incredible amount of risk and it paid of.

You never hear about the thousands (millions?) that took similar level of risk and didn't make it. Actually billionaire stories are almost typical example of reckless behaviour. There is a bit a cognitive dissonance in society to strongly reject billionaire behaviour except when it all works out and your behaviour become instead aspirational stories to be emulated.

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What you're describing reminds me of survivor bias - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

That's pretty much what any successful business story is. It's not like a market springs up, and the eventual dominators of that market immediately own it. There is lots of competition and failed ventures and aquisitions etc. Then we hear about the literal survivors that dominate in the end.

Few gamers of today recall VooDoo or SGI, for instance. And most consumers have no idea what a Tandy is (was?).

Oh man, you mention Tandy. Dick Smith (which was basically Tandy in Australia) finally went tits up a couple of months ago. They'd been bought out by some mob that wanted them to be the next Harvey Norman, and the pivot did not go well. Happily Altronics and Jaycar seem to have picked up the slack between them and we still have someone to turn when we want to buy misc. parts.

Thanks for this, was interesting to read about all the Dick Smith clones of American computers back in the day.

Precisely. It's a perfect example of survivor bias.

SJ's track record was actually n=3.

Apple made him the youngest tech multi-millionaire. Pixar a billionaire. Apple, again, where he built the world's most valuable company and insane profits.

More n than most billionaires, no? Only Buffet has a real n>5.

I could see a case being made that iTunes with its disruption of the music industry should count as a success on its own. Same for the iPhone and App Store. Same possibly in the future for Apple TV (we'll see), although obviously Steve's participation in thst one was limited to the envisioning phase. But you might get me on a technicality by saying that n represents actual successful IPOs. In that case take this comment as not being about n, but more about simply business successes.

Well Apple had something of an inside track there, as they were already a household name in the creative industries.

You're absolutely right, I was keeping it simple to stay out of SJ fanboy derailments.

Key is he was not a one-trick pony. Real data to prove it.

Right now I'd put Bezos in that category with an n=2 (ecommerce, AWS).

To show a counterexample, Brin/Page have an n=1 - ads. Rest is cool tech, but not significant business and yes, I am adding Youtube into the ads business idea.

Same with Zuckerberg, both Instagram and WhatsApp were about adding eyeballs to the same business model - super ideas, but additive. If Facebook Workplace takes off as a paid-for business, he will have n=2.

How about Elon Musk? He would rate n=3, don't you think?

now that one is interesting.

Does PayPal count? How much relied on the others? I don't know.

Tesla, Solarcity and SpaceX are all on the verge, but not quite there yet.

5 years from now he either has a n=3+ or is known as a massive flameout. but yeah, good shot at being a SJ 2.0.

Shai Agassi of Better Place comes to mind: https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...

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