I Took My Startup From $20k/month to 0
failory.com
failory.com
This sentiment is starting to get really old and I'm reading it a lot lately. Luck happened after he'd put in the time and effort to build a solid product, launch it and make it available for public consumption. He didn't just get lucky and make a product appear out of thin air.
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."
When you have a product to sell, you're able to capitalize on the opportunity to market and sell that product. Those opportunities don't present themselves until you have put in the work.
> Those opportunities don't present themselves until you have put in the work
Being able to put it the work, specially in tech, is absurdly lucky. Even out of tech, people are not just born with the skills required to put in the work and build a product – be it digital or not. Access to education is luck. Access to quality education is extreme luck. And a specific kind of luck that is presented to a few more than to most.
Luck plays a much bigger role than preparation and opportunity alone.
Being born with privilege of any kind is luck. Even if you’re a hard worker, the chance of being very successful varies dramatically based on your initial state.
I’d argue it is helpful to frame luck in this way so you’re less likely to buy into the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” narrative.
You don't have to be born with the skills to put in the work and build a product or a business for that matter. You have to decide to do it and put in the work to learn what you need to learn. People do this everyday. Tons of people start businesses without a business degree. Tons of people learn to write code who previously had no idea how.
In the US at least, educational materials are everywhere. Public libraries, online resources, free entrepreneurial mentoring groups.
Access to education may seem like luck, but it's usually the result of the hard work and decision making of your parents to ensure that you have access to education. Same with quality education. And those decisions likely came from the work of their parents and those before them.
When my wife and I bought our first home, we looked at school ratings to influence our decisions. Our kids don't have access to quality education because of luck, they have access to it because we made it a priority for them to have access to it.
Inevitably the followup to that is that everybody can't afford to move to a good school district and I 100% agree with that sentiment. It's also why I pushed for school choice programs to be everywhere. For some reason, whenever choice is mentioned, people immediately declare it somehow linked racism but for the life of me I can't follow the narrative.
If your child isn't zoned for a good school and you can't afford to move for a better option or pay for a good private school, I can't begin to understand how restricting choice is a good thing because it will remove the economic restrictions that block off quality educational opportunities.
That luck is created because of bad policy, of decisions that people make to ignore means to address these issues and lock in the status quo. Which means it's not luck at all, it's simply a side effect of the decisions of a lot of other people.
None of it is luck. It's years of compound decisions.
And there are a number of people who recognize the opportunities that they were denied in their own life because of the decisions of their parents, who then make a decision to make sure that their children have better opportunities. There are so many parents out there who work themselves to death to provide a better life and world for their kids.
That's not luck. That's a decision.
I consider it random chance whether ones parents go the extra mile or not. I had zero influence on being born in a western country having parents who worked hard to afford to send me off to university.
"but human affairs are nearly all matters of pure chance. But the fact is that, although one may appear to be quite right in saying this about sea-faring and the arts of the pilot, the physician, and the general, yet there really is something else that we may say with equal truth about these same things.
Clinias: What is that?
Athenian: That God controls all that is, and that Chance and Occasion co-operate with God in the control of all human affairs. It is, however, less harsh to admit that these two must be accompanied by a third factor, which is Art. For that the pilots' art should cooperate with Occasion—verily I, for one, should esteem that a great advantage. Is it not so?"
Plato's remark at Euthydemus 280a is also relevant:
"And your reason, I said, is this, that you would fare with better fortune in the hands of a wise one than of an ignorant one?
He assented.
So that wisdom everywhere causes men to be fortunate: since I presume she could never err, but must needs be right in act and result; otherwise she could be no longer wisdom.
We came to an agreement somehow or other"
Umh..how about I dunno just using your computer and a Microsoft word or Libre office and storing the data locally on your computer or usb stick. Weird.
The model seems very hard to execute on though; Diaspora comes to mind.
I think there's a mismatch between what people say they want ("I care about owning my data") vs how they behave ("I'll go with whatever is most convenient").
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I read this article for far too long trying to find some more detail on how, or why, the blockchain enabled him to create a privacy centered document writing service but found nothing. Another solution looking for a problem I suppose
It’s not perfect but it is an alternative.
That's very impressive!