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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

Building a business is absolutely not like winning a lottery. There is no instant win.

The vast majority is hard work on executing a plan, so that you're even in the correct place to take advantage of a lucky opportunity that comes along. Even the lottery requires you to actually buy a ticket at some point. Luck is a part of everyone's lives, but nothing happens without action.

And how do you know what's a wise course for anyone else? There are stories of success and failures everywhere. Learn from them all, and do what you want.

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Building a business is absolutely not like winning a lottery. There is no instant win.

I didn’t say that, and that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about s 24 year old and a $5 billion dollar business. That would make his company one of 227 active unicorns in the world, which frankly makes the lottery comparison incredibly apt.

If your only comparison is that it is rare in terms of odds, then that is even more of a reason to write about attaining such success since it is so difficult to achieve.

Winning an Olympic gold medal is similarly difficult but I'm sure you wouldn't say that it's just a lottery and not worth writing about.

Hardly. There have been over five thousand Olympic gold medals won, which is a hell of a lot more than the numbers we’re talking about with unicorns. When you realistically whittle unicorns down to those started by very young people and built rapidly from essentially nothing it’s even more stark.

Even putting aside the degree to which a gold medal relies on recognition of both measuresble inborn talent and acquired expertise, it’s not very similar. We’re not talking about success being difficult to achieve, so much as a certain scale and type of success being impossible to predict, possessing exceedingly low odds, and being largely random within the pool of “people trying.” If we”re being honest that describes lotteries and this story, and not Olympic gold.

We're going in circles and the pedantic comparisons don't help.

If you think it's pure luck, then that means building (this) business is no different than winning the lottery - which you specifically said wasn't the comparison before.

If it's not all luck, then that means success takes difficult work and odds only further show the challenge in getting to this scale, in which case it's perfectly fine to write about.

So which is it?

"a certain scale and type of success being impossible to predict, possessing exceedingly low odds, and being largely random within the pool of “people trying.”"

Ok...? This isn't relevant, it just shows thats its difficult to get there (with some luck required).

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