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Comment by AndrewGCook | Hacker News Reader

I just heard Drew Houston of DropBox talk in Boston at StartupBootcamp and this resume rings true to what he said.

The reality is that every founder starts in the same place and at the same point, which is completely clueless. Apple, Google, Yahoo, Oracle, Facebook and many others were started by first time founders in their 20’s. Facebook was just a project that Zuckerbug was hacking on, and he didn’t’ set out to redefine the face of communication. He had done 7-8 other projects before that, and the difference with Facebook was that 90%+ of Harvard students sign up in two days.

Something all new founders should remember is that no one is born a founder.

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That's sorta true, but only applies to specific technical & domain skills needed by your industry. There are a lot of "soft" skills needed to found a successful company, and entrepreneurs start in wildly different places for this.

DropBox was Drew's second company, and I remember him saying that his experience with the first and the intervening jobs was what made him so determined to do it "right" this time and have the persistence to stick it out. Facebook was Zuckerburg's third company; he'd already had acquisition offers from Microsoft for his second (Synapse Media Player). Apple was Steve & Steve's second company together; the first was selling blue-boxes. Google was started by first-time founders, but they were first-time founders who had the background and upbringing to have confidence in themselves and believe they could change the world.

I completely agree with you. Most of the time founders have no clue of what they are doing or how to do it. Most start with a simple idea or problem to solve and then start doing something about it with no plans or roadmap. Like Google for example, it started as a simple phD project and is now the most visited website in the world worth billions of dollars.

Back in 1998 Brin and Page had no idea of what they would accomplish with Google. Or Mark, which coded a website that million of coders could code. The difference is that he met the right people and persevered.

But that is why it is so fun to be a founder, you never know what to expect or how far you can go. Its scary and fun.

The constant among those companies/founders is that they were started by technical/engineer founders. IMHO, tech companies should at least have 1 technical co-founder. I'm sure someone has data around the correlation between success of web/internet companies and whether or not they had a technical co-founder.

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