Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

I think it's worth discussing things that actually lead to positive outcomes in business settings rather than looking at outliers who mostly got lucky. People I know in the "successful entrepreneurs despite never getting lucky" category generally have some combination of attributes that the whole VC industry (including wishful founders) often downplays:

- Actual domain expertise (a summer internship or talking to a few people doesn't count)

- A solid grasp on business fundamentals and managing teams effectively

- A strong network of people who serve as potential employees, partners, customers, mentors, etc. due to being outgoing and generally spending time on developing relationships

- An uncanny ability to recognize niche business problems that are underserved by existing options

- A willingness to laugh at concepts like "work-life balance", "happy marriage", and "spend more time with your kids"

- The ability to build a strong team from nothing and keep it strong by firing people who suck and rewarding people who are good

- Recognition of what you are and are not good at, and then finding good people to do the latter for you

- The ability to sell things effectively (no, if you build it they probably won't just come)

I'm sure others on HN have their own lists.

Why do you need to categorise this? It seems so utterly futile: "Oh, just do these ten things, and you will become a billionaire...all you need to know is the secret knowledge that only billionaires know".

Do something you enjoy. Stop trying to study the success of other people and reverse engineer it. Not for anything else: you can be sure that they spent more time just doing the thing they wanted to do rather than study other people for tips.

I do get this feeling. I went through it. But then I realised that none of the stuff that matters to me is going to change. If you want to be able to jump into a big pool of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck...then maybe.

Also, if you are really interested in business the absolute last thing you should be doing is building lists of personal characteristics. Read what public companies are doing, read financial reports, etc. That is actual business (I don't think the OP is interested in business, he just wants success...which is something else...go into politics maybe?).

"Oh, just do these ten things, and you will become a billionaire"

I think you're completely misconstruing what you responded to. That list is neither about becoming a billionaire nor about what to do to get there. It's describing talents or tendencies that make people build things worth millions, not billions.

I don't think it's misconstrued at all. You build things worth millions or billions by doing the actual work to build them. Not by aping the personality traits of people who built other things.

If you succeed at building a business, you won't be building anything outside of the first few years. Other people will, and you will need the traits and skills the OP described to guide them and make your company succeed.

If your point is that hardly anyone can read a list of personality traits and then go out and adopt them, I certainly agree. But I don't think that was being promoted as plausible.

Personally, I'd like to take any path that ends with a Scrooge McDuck pool.

How many throats are you willing to slit? :-)

(Note: Just kidding - I am not really suggesting said behavior.)

Good thought, but I don't think surgeons are making pool-of-gold-coins money ;)

I'd definitely watch the movie if someone made a dark film about Scrooge McDuck's younger years as a crime boss...

Yes and no.

I agree with everything except #5. My marriage & kids are irreplaceable.

So if you have everything else, which is a more rational bet:

- Investing in a low probability, massive payoff

- Investing in a lower (yet still high) payoff with less variation in expected outcome.

There are huge segments of the economy where you can buy a small business for at a 3 - 6 multiple of annual earnings. Many companies in this space are unsophisticated, so there is massive potential for operational improvement as well (introducing basic process, tech, and marketing strategies).

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