Hacker News Reader

The "lucked into" thing resonates with me. I've done pretty well and have had a zillion people tell me I got lucky.

I used to really resent that. I bootstrapped my company, I took no salary for the first 2-3 years, instead I was out consulting to bring in money so I could pay the people who worked for me. That didn't seem like luck to me.

I built technology that most of you use daily, before I came along people thought the answer to their SCM problems was Subversion. I had to fight like crazy to get smart people like Linus to understand that I had a better answer. It was tons and tons of work. Getting people to see the value of what I had built didn't seem like luck to me.

I built a viable business and did all the sales. I used a portable phone with a base station that had an extra battery and it was routine that I would have to flip over to speaker phone, swap batteries, and continue the sales calls. 16 hour days were the norm on the phone.

My view was that it wasn't luck, it was hard work. A lot of hard work.

My view evolved. Yep, I did a ton of work, many many 80 hour weeks. Any founder knows what that is like. But there was an element of luck involved - I was at the right place, at the right time, with the right answers. Multiple times in my career that has happened. Is all the credit due to me? Not really, the luck part is being in a place where your work will go somewhere. You have to do all that hard work and you have to get lucky, hard work is not enough.

And that is why I log in as luckydude.

Bless you. Seriously.

It's truly refreshing to hear such genuine humility and perspective. Too many people (on HN, in politics, and in everyday life) work hard, hit it big, then draw a 100% correlation between the two. The reality is that lots of people are working hard, and only a tiny percentage get rich from it. Luck -- birth, education, time, place -- is too often underestimated in the rush to claim personal credit.

Like you, I have been profoundly lucky. I've worked hard for my piece, but I'd never be able to honestly look my lower-middle-class extended family in the eyes and tell them my wealth came because I worked harder than them. Because that would be a lie.

humility ? What is this 'humility' you speak of?

There is a war on humility for like 20 years now. Things that people unashamedly say today would label them total lunatics 2 decades ago.

I think that's because perceptions about what makes success have slowly shifted from the long path of toil to the superawesome promotion game.

It's like the political cartoon I saw from a few months ago. The Jeopardy-style host said, “I’m sorry, Jeannie, your answer was correct, but Kevin shouted his incorrect answer over yours, so he gets the points.” http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/a20602

Given the state of funding and never-profitable unicorns, it teaches new entrepreneurs that the way to success is through promotion and emotion.

I think that's a rare and commendable attitude. The statistics in the article support the idea of luck. You did all the right things and succeeded. But how many of the people running the businesses that failed did all the right things as well? Probably a decent number of them. Not the majority, by any means, but a decent minority. A lot of people fail because they don't do the right things, but doing the right things isn't a guarantee of success: it's necessary but not sufficient.

> The statistics in the article support the idea of luck

Not really.

High ratio of failed startup can easily be explained by either lack of grit or lack of skills of by both.

You are unquestionably right for some portion of those failures, and I'd bet it's a large portion.

Nevertheless, there is an element of serendipity, good luck, good fortune, call it what you will, in any successful business endeavour. To some extent, yes, you can make your own luck, in that you can stack the odds in your favour but, if we are going with a betting analogy, it still doesn't entirely block the house from winning.

Many people are way too quick to take too much credit for their achievements. Everything we do is built on a foundation of what came before, supplemented by our own hard (and intelligently directed) work, and that rather hard to define good fortune.

Yeah, what bartread said. In no way did I mean to minimize the hard work that people do (and I did) to be successful. There is an awful lot of "make your own luck". But you still have to be at the right place at the right time. It's easy to say "well, duh, that's why I was there" and take credit and a certain amount of that is valid.

On the other hand, I've seen people with more talent than I have fail. If it were solely about their ability then they'd be rich.

I'm in the same boat. 6 months into a 7 days a week routine of bootstrapping my business. It's beginning to pay off but being so selfish with my time has definitely frayed relationships. Luckily these are friends I've known long enough to understand that the frequency of our friendship says nothing of its quality.

Plus don't underestimate the power of a WhatsaApp group or email to rekindle connections.

> this is not really a major concern of mine at this time, but I suspect it may be a regret later.

Possibly. If you succeed though (and I hope you do), the door opens to more connections. Not that friendships are interchangeable but to own your time and be a successful business owner provides the tools and experience to meet many like-minded individuals.

Depending on your age and interests, the 'digital nomad' scene is an excellent way to meet interesting peeps who will '"understand the obsession and inability to "turn it off."'

>>They don't understand what it takes to get a customer to actually pay you

With your username I'd expect you to get paid in full.

Yeah, he ain't no joke.