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Comment by expertentipp | Hacker News Reader

We often forget that basically always brilliant successful kids have solid fundaments in form of their parents, affluent in the financial and legal domains. Even then they don't always succeed - remember that British kid who sold a recommendation engine to Yahoo?

The rags-to-riches in the industry doesn't exist, move along people.

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>remember that British kid who sold a recommendation engine to Yahoo?

Nick D'Aloisio? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_D'Aloisio)

I was confused when you mentioned him, then I realized you think he didn't succeed because he's not a billionaire or didn't create the next Facebook.

Young millionaire studying at Oxford? I would trade places with that dude in a heartbeat. From everything I'm reading on his Wikipedia page, he seems to be doing quite well.

As you are on British Facebook, that would be Friends Reunited. Not created by British peasants either.

Yes, because poor (or not-well-off) people have this enormous respect of money, and of people who have accumulated lots of it. They don’t want to waste this investor‘s time, and they are scared of asking customers for money.

Well-off people don’t have these problems. That random investor is just like their dad, plus or minus the Rolex, and they know their language („Have you been to Martha’s this year?“). Asking for money is not a problem either because they never experienced the process of spending money as painful - their worldview is that you have a certain budget to spend, and when it’s gone you either wait a bit or get some more.

It's about consequences as well. Someone not-affluent and not-well-connected will not be able to wash off the liability for burning down millions.

It’s so funny when you think about it. People are scouring the globe looking for places to put their money. They’ll hire armies of people to look for places to put their money. If I remember right Felix Dennis talked about this a lot in his book.

Isn't it more a case that Yahoo! wasn't that discerning?

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