A Hacker News comment about entrepreneurship, darts, and wealth goes viral
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But while chimps may outperform thousands of managers for one year, they won't outperform a Warren Buffett or a George Soros for decades.
The claim that Buffett's and Soros's performance is due to luck can be easily debunked nowadays after the Covid 19 pandemic. Now lots of people understand p-values. By this I mean lots compared to before, in absolute terms it's still too few people who understand null-hypothesis testing. Oh, and if you read this and want to shoot me down with some Bayesian things, you can leave it for some other time. In any case, just like you can test if the outcomes of vaccination are due to random chance, you can check if the performance of Berkshire Hathaway is due to pure luck. In both cases you'll get a really tiny p-value, so you can say you decidedly rejected the null hypothesis.
In the case with this twit, it's difficult to do a statistical significance test. But consider this: it's undeniable that Warren Buffett's results are not due to randomness, and also Michael Jordan's results, and Tom Brady's results.
Tom Brady has won 7 NFL championship, more than the total wins of all the active NFL quarterbacks in the league combined. But guess what, luck is a huge factor in the NFL, for the simple reason that players get injured a lot. The best team at the start of a season can be decimated by the end of it. Still, somehow he won 7 times in 22 years, in a league with 32 teams. Is this due to throwing darts?
Then why is Musk's success due to throwing darts? Or Zuckerberg's success? Did Zuck throw and miss, then throw again, and again, and again, and hit the bull's eye the tenth time? No, he succeeded right away, and kept demolishing every obstacle that he found in his path.
This dart throwing metaphor is so appealing: "meh, that guy was just lucky, I could've done the same myself, but I just couldn't afford to play the game".
But it's also so toxic.
[1] https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-succ...
Zuckerberg is a bad example, he was truly lucky.
In my 20 years doing this, my experience aligns with the original comment this post is about. It's healthcare. Unless you can afford to float your household expenses including Healthcare for a year, you can't play in the early stage startup game. It's just simple survival, some of us have to work to survive.
Zuckerberg was not "truly lucky". He succeeded where My Space failed. And where the mighty Google failed too (do you remember Google Plus?). It's very comforting to say it's luck, but it just isn't.
Also, just so I'm not accused for being a Zuck fanboy, I don't have a Facebook account, and I consider Facebook a borderline evil company, and Zuck quite slimy. But just a lucky guy he is not.
Google Plus was late to the same party. Let's also not forget that, when Plus launched in 2011, the competition between the two organizations was Google running for its dinner and Facebook running for its life.
That does not diminish the result of Facebook defending its turf. Google then (and now) was the 800 pound gorilla in tech. Facebook resisting the attack, and making Google run with it tail between its legs is not a small achievement.
I would still say that the difference in stakes between the two companies (with Facebook looking at the ash heap if they lost) was a bigger factor.
Lots of people can't afford to play the startup game. I was one, you were probably one.
But those who can, once they enter the game, it's a type of "Hunger Games". It's very psychologically taxing. It's definitely not "throwing darts". The super-successful CEO of Zappos very likely committed suicide [1]. The supper-successful author of the "Four hour work week", Timothy Ferris, almost did the same [2]. Very few people just "throw the dart", miss, and throw again.
The idea that success is all luck is very disrespectful. I personally did not venture and did not gain. But I don't go around happy go lucky telling everyone that I could be just as good as Musk or Bezos or Zuckerberg, but I just did not have the right parents.
There are results, and there are excuses. I don't have the results to show, I'm not going to show excuses. Or rather, I have results commensurate with my efforts and my risk appetite. I'm not Zuckerberg or Musk, I'm not even Paul Graham, but I'm not destitute either. Lots of middle class Americans are just like me. They have put a lot of hard work to get where they are, and they are happy with what they have accomplished in life; they would have liked to have achieved more, and hope to achieve more between now and the moment they retire.
The problem with the darts argument is that it negates all they (and I) did in life. That argument is not just about Musk and Zuckerberg, is about all hard working middle class people in America. "Yes, you got where you are, but you were just throwing darts. I would have gotten there just as easily as you, but I had to wash dirty dishes behind the counter". Well no, I was one of the guys washing dishes too. I'm not a trust fund baby. I come from a middle class family who helped me as much as they could, but just in terms of general parental support, not in terms of money.
The darts argument is not just nullifying what Musk and Zuck did. It's nullifying what I did in my life, and what other people like me did. That's why I find it toxic. That's why lots of people like me find it toxic.