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Comment by MOARDONGZPLZ | Hacker News Reader

I got super lucky. I started a company and didn’t really have any meaningful traction. I was about to shut it down. Walking out of the grocery store one night after work, I passed by my former manager when I was an intern. We got to talk for about 30 seconds, mentioned my company, she asked me to email her. I did, and that very quickly led to my first big customer which makes me about double what a FAANG swe would make.

My advice: get lucky.

My insight porn version: 10 easy steps I used to get $500K ARR and how you can do it too

View on HN

"Get lucky" is always the key - however, you can increase your "luck surface" by doing certain things (for example, you couldn't have gotten lucky if you hadn't started the company, nor if you hadn't bothered to talk to people).

Not just getting lucky, but being ready to get lucky. If they didn't have the company or the product already, bumping into the former manager wouldn't be enough. And I think I've just given the type of advice TFA is railing about :)

Well it’s true, you can’t win the lottery without buying the ticket. Only that way you don’t know what prize you’re playing for.

Ross Brawn said in his book about strategy that the luck is preparation waiting for opportunity

> you can increase your "luck surface" by doing certain things

....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class.

> ....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class.

That's some good insight porn right there!

> That's some good insight porn right there!

...and yet, all poor people know it by heart (unless they were born into a rich family that has just fallen from grace), , because it's totally true.

For more good insight: wealthy families know a lot more about how to make money when you have some money. Poor families know a lot more about avoiding the risk of being totally broke from an unlucky event, because they know they'd be totally unable to recover from it (not having the safety net of education and wealthy contacts that the upper-middle class have even when they go broke).

Somewhat true except for the fact that education isn't fixed. It's a variable that changes.

You might start with little wealth and accumulate education on your journey. Therefore in the early years when you lose wealth it's difficult to accumulate more, but over time it can become easier as you are more educated and experienced.

Having little wealth when young also allows you to live on very little - when combined with an education you can use this very nicely to say bootstrap a product.

Right, education is a form of capital.

Which means that those who begin with more of it will have a head-start which grows exponentially, leaving behind those which start with none of it.

While this is true, it also isn’t helpful. Play the cards you have, not the cards you wish you had.

You always gotta start somewhere. Might as well start with what you’ve got and go from there.

I don't know why this is getting downvoted. Yes, inequality exists and it sucks, but you still need to make the best out of what you have.

Also, a lot of people seem to far overestimate the work and risk involved. This doesn't help really poor people, obviously, but the amount of people with sufficient money, backing and time that complained they'd start a company if they "only also had $20 million backing from their parents" is staggering.

People don't want to admit it involves hard work and luck - they'd rather think that Bill Gates got to where he is because of his parents (even though there are thousands/millions with similar parents and backgrounds who didn't get even close).

Because one line of thought leads to: "I couldn't do anything, the game was rigged from the start" and the other leads to "I didn't do as much as I could have done."

> People don't want to admit it involves hard work and luck

My favorite realization from actually playing cards. We used to play a lot of rummy on vacations as a family. Like a lot.

I kept losing. Hard. Absolutely destroyed. If only I could get this one card to complete my hand, I’d win every time. But it just wouldn’t come! I had terrible luck. Someone else always ended up winning before I got the one card I needed to make the high score and beat everyone else into submission. It was infuriating.

After a while I changed tactics. No waiting. Make a play on every play. Something, anything, with whatever cards you’ve got. Find a way to make the card you just picked up work.

Suddenly I was winning almost every game. Everyone complained how much it sucks to play cards with me. How does this kid always get exactly the perfect card!?

Now I’m banned from playing cards with family. Last time I played rummy was with my girlfriend’s family over Christmas a few years ago. They banned me immediately. Cards never come up again in conversation lol.

It really isn’t about the cards. They’re just the ingredient.

This is really visible in bridge; the hands are all random but how you play them is entirely skill.

Anyone can win with a perfect hand; the skill comes in dealing with the imperfect hands. True in life, too.

Bridge is nice that you can compensate for skill somewhat by handicapping, and the less-skilled players can still get a great hand and win sometimes. I always say "bridge is a fun game to lose" - and that's a really important part of a game you want to play.

Bridge is a weird game in that the actual play of the hand is almost unimportant. You can lose the game by playing the hand badly, but you can only win consistently in the bidding.

Which is why abstract and complicated bidding systems dominate the game, which gives it that lovely, steep initial learning curve.

now imagine each bad play had a cost and you had a budget before too many knocked you out of the game

now imagine doing nothing had a cost and you decided to sit there and pout because others have better cards

This is really not a helpful reply.

To make rummy a good metaphor for this discussion, you need to modify the normal $1/point rummy gambling rules; say making gin gives you $1000 bonus from the house or something. (There's a resemblance to quiddich here, I think.) Anyway, now you have the two extreme strategies: knock if you can, which gets you a few dollars each time, or try exclusively for gin, which usually costs you money on each hand but sometimes pays off. If you're skint, the gin strategy won't work since you can't stay in the game long enough. If you're flush, the knock strategy is uninteresting because a few dollars doesn't make a difference.

Now make that bonus $10,000,000,000 and you're making some unicorns, Harry!

Now imagine you only have budget for a single round before being eliminated and some of your opponents have money to keep playing indefinitely. That would be the most accurate metaphor

Well, there's always the option to kick the table over.

There's an interesting genre of card games (President https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_%28card_game%29 probably being a good representative) which are literally rigged in a way that makes the previous winner easier to win the next time and harder for the previous loser to succeed.

There is still quite some mobility, but it effectively makes for different optimal tactics within the same game as your unfair start position determines whether it's best to risk things or not, what score is achievable depending on your position, etc and IMHO it has quite some parallels with real life decision making.

But the true answer lies between the two.

The game is rigged. But that merely makes it less likely that someone who's on the wrong side can succeed, not impossible. You do have to do as much as you can, with what you're given, regardless of what it is.

The real key, though, is that this tells us what we, as a society, need to change. If we genuinely value entrepreneurship and innovation, we need to create a universal safety net that lets people take risks, try things, and fail, again and again, without ending up destitute, because we know that is what leads to eventually creating a successful business.

Isn’t this what limited liability corporations help ensure?

People need a way to limit downsides, not have zero downside.

It’s like giving a student a service chance at a test to help ensure they learn the material. But giving them unlimited attempts with no risk doesn’t create the same environment.

LLCs let you avoid having personal liability for accidents, corporate malfeasance, etc. They don't let you avoid having to invest your own money into the company to try to make it go, because no one else cares enough about your idea to do so, then lose it all if it fails.

Having something like universal basic income absolutely does not reduce the risk to zero. What it does is it reduces the penalty for failure—failure which is often largely out of your hands. Rather than such failures meaning you lose your life savings, have no job, and are months/weeks/days from homelessness, they would mean you are making only the minimum needed to sustain housing, food, and clothing. For most people, particularly those of the type to try starting their own business, that still won't be enough to be happy.

The threat of death by exposure and starvation should not be what drives us to do better. We, as a society, should have moved past that already.

LLCs do provide limitations towards losing your life savings or home. They create a buffer between personal and corporate assets. I think a key difference is the benefits are targeted towards those who are trying to create value, whereas UBI is much less targeted. At least from an economic sense, LLCs seem like a much more efficient mechanism.

Sure, they prevent you losing those things if the company loses more money than it has and the creditors want to come after you personally.

They don't prevent you losing those things if you invested your life savings in the company, and you mortgaged your home to invest more. Which are both things that people trying to get companies off the ground do, especially if they don't otherwise have the means to do so.

If you're considering the primary purpose of a UBI as being encouraging entrepreneurship, then sure, they're not that efficient. I do not consider that to be its primary purpose, nor have I yet spoken to anyone who does. It is one of many, many benefits to a UBI that should be considered.

It might not be helpful to the individual, but it provides a useful guideline for society - everyone is capable of doing great stuff, as long as the means for doing so are provided.

I'd bet my life on this - if every homeless person was given a place to live, recovery from addiction (if needed), mental health counceling, education and a job, a significant percentage of them would become productive members of society.

> a significant percentage of them would become productive members of society

The average homeless experience lasts about 2 years. So yes, you are right.

https://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/How_Many.html

I'd argue the same point even if we took only chronically homeless into consideration instead of an average homeless.

You’re right it’s not helpful towards the goal of becoming an entrepreneur or whatever, but I disagree that it’s not helpful at the macro level.

We should all have this basic understanding of how our society works, and how our plutocrats got to be in the position they are in. We’re fed myths that they all started from the bottom and worked hard enough and smart enough to get where they are, and you can do it too! And if you can’t, you’re just not as smart or hard working as they are. These myths serve the people in power by preserving the status quo. I believe it is helpful to remind people that we should change the status quo instead of adopting a “grindset” to get yours within it.

> We’re fed myths that they all started from the bottom and worked hard enough and smart enough to get where they are, and you can do it too!

i know this may be rhetoric but i’ve never heard someone say that. a lot of folks in power say “I got lucky but also worked hard”

it’s counter productive to claim the elite is this super disconnected group of people. because they are not and it weakens the case for reform.

let’s be honest many successful people work hard, yet most unsuccessful people don’t.

there’s a number of lazy successful people

there’s also a bunch unsuccessful hard working people

nuance is better than hyperbole

The elite are a super disconnected group of people. My understanding is that their children don't even have the same capacity for empathy as children from other classes. Money literally changes how humans think, such that humans with significant wealth have a different psychology. There is of course nuance but let's not pretend like moneyed people, new or old, are normal.

> My understanding is that their children don't even have the same capacity for empathy as children from other classes

I don't know. It seems like you are dehumanizing rich kids which I don't really think it's a great idea. Sure, entitlement is a thing but it's not like rich kids don't have their own struggles

I never said anything you are disagreeing with.

> let’s be honest many successful people work hard > there’s also a bunch unsuccessful hard working people

The key point is that the number of unsuccessful hard working people is humongously larger than successful hard working people, so working hard does not really correlate with having success, no matter what the survivor bias tell them.

probably philosophical difference

“so you’re saying there’s a chance!?”

is good enough for me, plus when i work hard i feel better even when it doesn’t pay off.

Right. It's the same reason why people buy lottery tickets.

If by "reform" you mean keeping these elites, then yeah, there's no case for that kind of reform. We're way past the point where that was viable.

The question now is how much violence will be involved in the next reboot of said elites. That it is coming has been obvious for almost a decade now.

In theory, hypothetically, it could be helpful in identifying when you don't have the proper situation to make success sufficiently likely -- perhaps you want to find another path where your situation is more advantageous. OR to identify what you, unique to your circumstances, might need to do to be in circumstances to maximize your luck, that other people woudln't -- like, in this case, cultivate a relational network of wealthy people that others might have out of the box. Or find a founder partner with a different balance of advantages/disadvantages, maybe you need a partner with those networks you don't have, while you bring other things to the table.

I'm reluctant to talk about this case specifically because it is so... fraught. People get mad, in both directions.

But in theory, there is no reason identifying the challenges in your starting situation that others might not have wouldn't be helpful. Isn't all information helpful?

Identifying challenges to overcome is extremely helpful. Necessary even!

Giving up before you even start just because it’s harder for you than someone else, that part doesn’t help.

The thing here can be anything. Losing weight, running a marathon, starting a business, climbing out of poverty into the middle class. You can’t get there unless you start.

> Giving up before you even start just because it’s harder for you than someone else, that part doesn’t help.

Doesn't help with what? In general, when you have your choice of direction, choosing a direction that plays to your strength instead of a direction where you are starting out handicapped compared to competitors can certainly help with your chance of success.

If we ignore the specifics about it being about the background you were born into, I think we'd all agree taht there are some people who exist who because of personal charecteristics or even personality are ill-suited to be startup founders, and have a poor chance of success, and maybe shoudln't do it, right?

It's just when we don't ignore that we are talking about social position specifically, in America we want to believe this can't be true because of your social position, we want to believe everyone has an equal chance regardless of social position. This is an ideology though, not based on observation. An ideology that says you have to pretend it doens't matter, not even identify the challenges to overcome.

So if you know you're going to have a harder time being successful than others, and that of course most startups fail anyway, and maybe you want to try it anyway after evaluating the risk and what will happen to you if you fail, but maybe you say actually, no, I don't want to do the thing that is already very risky and I have an additional handicap for... maybe instead of being a founder I'm going to look for someone else's startup to join, or maybe I'm going to try to work at a FAANG instead -- when you say it "doesn't help", what do you mean -- it doesn't help who do what? And who would it help to do what if you were to insist upon doing it even though it will be harder for you than someone else?

I think you’re conflating 2 different things.

You mention adjusting tactics and strategies, even goals, based on circumstances. This is what “playing the cards you have” is. You do what you can with what you’ve got.

Giving up before you start doesn’t help because it’s a shut down. You don’t even get to the part of assessing viability and weighing risk.

The point is that if you want a change on whatever dimension you choose to care about, you have to do something. What that something is depends on the cards you have. How far it can take you again depends on circumstances.

And it’s fine to not want to do things. Or see the costs and decide that kind of life is not for you. But at least you took the time to evaluate.

> Giving up before you start doesn’t help because it’s a shut down. You don’t even get to the part of assessing viability and weighing risk.

Now you're adding "before you start", who said that until you did? Ok, what if instead you've gotten to the part of assessing viability and weighing risk and then decided not to go down that path, of, say, founding a startup.

> What that something is depends on the cards you have. How far it can take you again depends on circumstances.

Right, perhaps depending on circumstances that something is not founding a startup.

I don't totally understand what we're disagreeing about. Or what you mean when you say "it doesn't help" -- help who do what?

I would say deciding your circumstances make it harder for you than others to found a startup, thus it would make more sense to join someone else's startup or look for a job at a FAANG or something instead -- could at least conceivably "help". Help you find a path that works better for you to find success. I'm not sure what you mean by your repetition that it "doesn't help", as, like, a logical a priori.

> Now you're adding "before you start", who said that until you did?

That was already in the comment your own (G)GP[1] was a reply to, so they're certainly not adding it "now."

> I don't totally understand what we're disagreeing about. Or what you mean when you say "it doesn't help" -- help who do what?

As I was going to reply to your (G)GP[1]: Help anyone with whatever it was they didn't even start on doing. Be it running a marathon or starting a company or... What does it matter? Isn't it obvious that if you never start training for a marathon, that won't help you run one? And that the same goes for starting a company -- if you never even start starting a company, then you'll never get to the point of having started a company? And the same for anything you might want to do?

What I don't understand is how anyone can honestly claim not to understand that.

___

[1]: Grandparent of your comment that I'm replying to; great-grandparent of this my reply.

>"While this is true, it also isn’t helpful. Play the cards you have, not the cards you wish you had."

certainly not, if you have bad cards it's better to bluff - What is there to lose?

btw the best book on the subject is unscripted from MJ DeMarco.

> if you have bad cards it's better to bluff

That's playing the cards you have.

I think it is helpful. Along with the cards analogy I would say the first step is knowing what cards you have.

As an example, being upper-middle class probably gives you an advantage on networking, either family, school old mates, ex colleagues, … Which I think is quite important when starting a business.

So realizing you don’t have that since the beginning will help.

I find remarks like GP useful, to put into perspective just how mind-boggingly unfair life is. This is a different frame of thinking ("headspace") than a self-improvement seeker is in, which explains the downvotes and the "boo"ing.

Imagine a civil engineer walks into the office and asks a colleague about the plans for the new housing project, and the colleague replies that the concept of a "house" is a rich and socially constructed idea that both reflects and influnces the social zeitgeist in subtle ways and is intimately tied to notions of community and private property. They are not wrong, and the civil engineer would probably learn new things if they let the colleague finish instead of laughing them off or firing them, it's just that there is this implicit shared context in the workplace, that "house" is not a subtle idea and our job is to plan and build them not talk about their history or philosophy, that the colleague is violating or ignoring.

This is a useful analogy to understand why a remark like GP's, very useful and very true and would drive you into despairing madness and perhaps the brink of suicide if you think about it honestly and deeply, is not welcome in a thread like this. There is an implicit context in the comment section (formed haphazardly in a distributed non-explicit way, unlike that of the analogy) that you have a bunch of latent opportunities that you can take for granted and build off them to new frontiers, and that those opportunities are more or less a "critical mass", you can make them into whatever outcome you want given a fair amount of work. This is non-trivial for a huge portion of humans, and yet the self-help context always assumes it without proof, and any pushback is interpreted as doomer nay-saying or unhelpful pedantry.

> While this is true, it also isn’t helpful.

It isn't quite helpful. The second half of the advice should be to tell working class people to do whatever they can to get near rich/upper-middle class people, to flatter them, befriend them, attend their parties, and sleep with them.

The more rich people around you, the luckier you get. Some rich manchild somewhere is waiting for you to be "the brains" behind something.

I'm annoyed by how true this comment has been for me. Lots of my success in life has been more about knowing the right people than about knowing the right things.

who wants to be "the brains" behind something which is not of his own?

Only your own cause and goal can generate the willpower and stamina necessary to ultimately create something great.

As Nietzsche said: "He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living things."

"who wants to be "the brains" behind something which is not of his own?"

Them as don't want to live in cardboard boxes but don't have some part of the resources necessary to "create something great"?

I will respond with another citation of the same author: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

The brains who you use to achieve someone else's goal instead of using it to become what you truly are is somewhat wasted. don't you think?

You do have to start somewhere. It's also important to know which goals are realistic relative to what position you're in.

If you're poor, do you go for the moonshot, or do you go for being middle class and then adjust your expectations once you're comfortable that you've achieved your initial goals? Going from nothing to something is more impressive than going from something to... more something.

Someone once seriously proposed making the final determining decision for who gets into Harvard be based on...a random drawing. (From an oversized pool of qualified applicants.)

The idea was students wouldn't go through the rest of their life thinking they'd prevailed in a meritocracy, and had earned and deserved every bit of their future success. They'd always have to acknowledge: some of it was pure luck.

It's an excellent idea which has been proposed more than once, including by me. ;)

It's an excellent idea for people who want to go to Harvard, and maybe even society at large, but a terrible idea for people who have gone to Harvard. And for Harvard.

And Harvard cares about the latter a lot more than it does about the former.

It has the additional added benefits:

- accepts that the admission team is not infallible.

- allows for the drawing pool to be more representative of some target demographic if one believes that the selection panel has inherent bias.

This is an old idea.

If you believe the pool of qualified candidates is much bigger than the student body for a school like this (pretty easily supportable, imo) then this is also obviously a good idea - if the primary purpose of the school is to provide a great education to any qualified individuals who exist.

I don't think any reading of the history of the ivy's and similar schools can really support the latter.

It essentially already is a random drawing... at those acceptance rates, you're getting admitted or rejected because the orchestra needed a flute player, or because the admissions officer was feeling gassy after lunch. Having admissions winnow down the applications to say 3x the class size and doing the rest by lottery just makes the luck factor explicit.

I imagined something totally different when you mentioned "a random drawing".

Perhaps they could submit 3 drawings, one of which would be randomly chosen.

All drawings would be displayed in a gallery, with a critic deciding which they like and which they dislike. A scribe would trail the critic with a notepad, writing down their critiques and informing the applicants why their drawing was declined or accepted.

> wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class.

"at least"?! upper-middle-class in US puts you well in the 0.5% of world population.

this is only true if the "unlucky" payout is not that big, so you can increase your "luck surface" without worrying about the effects for "unlucky" results, otherwise increase your "lucky surface" could increase your downside of "unluckyness"

Technology startups are naturally kind of like this. They have limited downside and unlimited upside.

However, in my life that limited downside has cost me a lot of money in opportunity costs over twenty years. I might be retired had I been able to work for money with the same energy and time I applied to my startup projects. But reality isn't quite like that, I would have been so unhappy doing that, it wouldn't have been sustainable (I tried working that hard for money for two years and it was horrible!) Those startup projects were so fulfilling and I learned so much on the journey. Even though I haven't found success yet, I haven't given up and the journey itself has been incredibly rewarding.

Solidarity, friend. Keep doing what makes you happy, keep learning every day, keep trying new things, keep meeting new people, and you're giving yourself the best odds you can get.

The book "Conspiracy: A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire's Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire" is a wonderful example of how what seemed to be a lucky break for Peter Thiel was actually a product of extensive preparation for an opportunity to take revenge on Gawker.

Thiel's lucky was PayPal. It projected him from very wealthy to super wealthy.

Subsequently, he's used the resources that that lucky has afforded him.

“Why successful founders never get their groceries delivered”

This is perfect.

...followed up a few years later with "I was wrong in my previous article and didn't go far enough. Read my part 2: Why successful founders should deliver groceries". You may get your chance to pitch a famous VC partner while you instacart/doordash.

No one ever talks about the opportunity cost of building up a "luck surface". What is the expected value of doing so? What do you have to sacrifice to do so? Is there any evidence the EV is positive, or is this just another selection bias?

Well, one extreme example is buying lottery tickets; it's the best way to expose yourself to the potential upside of winning the lottery, yet the expected value is quite negative.

That example is quite bracing, but I think it points out that there are many ways to build this 'luck surface', and the expected values of each are probably very different, and likely situational.

>there are many ways to build this 'luck surface', and the expected values of each are probably very different, and likely situational.

I agree. Something as straightforward as being known as someone who does good work, putting yourself out there somewhat (writing, speaking, etc.), basically developing a network of people who you know at least professionally is certainly a way a lot of people develop at least something of a "luck surface." It may well not produce the big win but it can certainly lead to "lucky" opportunities.

Of course, there are other options that are more like gambles that may have negative EV but if you don't play big you probably won't win big.

All the talk about building a great "luck surface" is just an attempt to deny luck: something might seem like luck, but it's really part of an intentional strategy to maximize potential value!

For any given "luck surface" strategy, you can find far more people who haven't achieved massive success using it than those who have. Some strategies are probably better than others, but those are not foreseeable in advance.

It's luck because you have no direct control over it - it happens by unpredictable circumstances.

Think of networking, and imagine every person you meet and build a rapport with as non-parametric distribution that you're randomly sampling from over time (future interactions). You have no clue if each sample is going to yield positive results, but you can increase your chance of a positive outcome overall by increasing the number of distributions (people) you're sampling from (maintaining relationships).

So much of it ends up by random chance, what else could it be but luck?

Expected value is really a dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets. I can't believe even supposedly good mathematicians use it.

The next dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets is to compare it with other long odds (lightning strikes, marrying your favorite actor). If you want to play along, the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe.

Buying lottery tickets is a simple framework. The upside of winning a lottery is significantly higher than the downside of losing one (per week or per month). So do it.

The opposite is driving recklessly to save a minute of your commute. It has significantly higher downside risks than the upside of time savings. So don't do it.

A lot of lottery-bashing people make 10000x worse sub-optimal decisions in their life and yet pick trashing a lottery ticket to feel superior about their decision making ability.

There's basically nothing I'm totally sure of, but I do know the probability of my existing in this universe is 1.

No. That's like flipping a coin and then saying the probability of getting heads is 1. The fact that something happened is not proof that it was guaranteed to happen.

Re-read what the GP claimed. Given the initial conditions of the universe, the probability it might eventually lead to my own existence may well be infinitessimal, but in the context of the probability of me winning the lottery (for example), my existence is already a given.

No, what he was saying was that the probability of you winning the lottery is quite high compared to the probability of you existing in the first place. His point was that mathematicians sometimes try to contextualize these very low probability scenarios so that lay-people don't collapse them all into a single "basically impossible" bucket. They're not wrong, but it's not a useful way to think about whether buying a lottery ticket is a good idea.

I'll quote: "the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe". That statement is categorically wrong. If you're going to consider the probability of my ever coming to existence in the first place, you need to count it as part of the probability of winning the lottery too. If it had said "the probability of anybody winning" I would've cut it some slack (though the probability that a universe might develop with sentient beings capable of inventing lotteries is still a prerequisite in both cases).

> I'll quote: "the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe". That statement is categorically wrong.

Yup -- it was written in a universe where the poster they replied to exists, so that probability is = 1 here.

Bashing on lottery tickets due to EV also really feels like it's really missing the point. Lottery tickets are a mechanism for enjoying a fantasy. Sure you could technically just pretend that you won $10^9, but there is a hard cliff from >0% to 0%. I buy lottery tickets (very very occasionally, but who cares!) because it helps me enjoy a fantasy about being radically independently wealthy.

There's no reason to hate on people for doing something that they enjoy, regardless of what the expected value is. For god's sake, I juggle! As a hobby! Can you imagine the expected return on THAT?

Buying a single $1 lottery ticket is fine. But I see people in gas stations etc. who look like they are spending a very large fraction of their disposable income on lottery tickets. People asking for "$60 of X" when they look like they make $50K a year or less. That's fucking insane and if they make 10000x worse decisions in their life it must be like putting their fingers in the electrical socket.

Yeah, I'll defend buying one lottery ticket, even a few per week, but more than that and you very quickly cross the line between "Fun Fantasy" and "Math Tax"

> the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe.

Is it, though? This claim ultimately hinges on the probability of life occurring in the universe, and that's pretty hard to assess given our lack of encounters with extraterrestrial life.

Once life is established and subject to evolutionary processes, I hypothesize that intelligent life is - barring some mass extinction event preventing it - just about inevitable; evolution will select for greater and greater intelligence until the local lifeforms achieve sapience (and possibly beyond even that, i.e. levels of intelligence we mere apes are incapable of comprehending).

I had an argument with my boss about this. He is a business owner and pretty successful one, and he calls the lottery a poverty tax, or a stupidity tax. If it were a game you play in Vegas, then he’d be right.

It’s my opinion that just buying one ticket, for say $2, essentially is a trivial and inconsequential amount of money that exposes you to incredible upside. Imagine if the ticket only cost a penny. At that point it’s practically free, but free exposure to life changing wealth. I don’t know if that counts as zero to 1 according to Peter Thiel, but it’s basically zero to something, for essentially nothing

but it does not cost a penny, hence strongly negative expected value and waste of money and time.

There are sometimes jackpot sizes that have a positive EV.

What about the people who do hundreds in instant lottery, or dozens to hundreds of dollars every week for the standard games (and no, they aren't ALL pooled for a frigging office).

Probably the real value is even worse than the expected value, because money has diminishing returns to happiness.

If buying a lottery ticket is a good idea, isn’t buying two better? How about spending everything you have on lottery tickets? Odds are the upside for you is still much larger than the downside. Maybe you’re saying that buying a single lottery ticket improves your odds of winning the lotto so much (infinitely many times in fact) that you just need one. There are a lot of lotteries in the world so.. get one of each? Also, how often should you buy one? One a week? One an hour? Maybe once a lifetime is enough, which is what I personally recommend.

It’s almost like there is another variable that determines if this is a dumb idea, and it almost always is. Maybe those math professors are on to something after all.

No they aren't.

Go back to the framework

Upside(Gain) / Downside(Risk) is a pretty simple framework.

All I'm saying is, Downside(Risk) is not f(Expected Value)

Downside(Risk) is not f(p(winning))

Being a bayesian, the probability of me existing in this universe is 1

Any time you spend trying and failing to quantify the EV of luck surface area is time you could be spending building your luck surface area.

You just might cost yourself an unfulfilling life you live out of duty.

> Luck is when opportunity meets preparedness.

And success is being lucky repeatedly, so you can't really plan for it; only be disqualified if you're below the minimum entry point of preparedness.

Anyone telling you that they worked hard to achieve their current success is falling to the survivor bias fallacy.

There is another layer here, which is how much you increase the "luck surface" by doing certain things. Is it 10%, so you move from 1% probability to have "success" to 1.1%? Or 50% from 30 to 45%?

Increasing the luck surface sounds smart and insightful and I have been guilty to use the term quite nonchalantly myself, but without quantification and direction of the luck-surface actions, it means very little.

In the specific case discussed, apart from the "building a company" part which is admirable but kinda to be taken for granted when selling services, it sounds like walking increased their luck surface. Had he taken a Uber or gone to a different store, maybe the company won't be here (guessing). I continue to call it luck.

My first company got its investment because one of my co-founders talked about it to a random stranger at a bar, who turned out to have money burning in his pocket.

I second your advice to get lucky.

Most of my 27 year career has followed as a domino from that. Once we'd paid back his investment and exited (for a pittance; the ISP marked we'd entered had become impossible for a small player), his lawyer happened to get a question from another client if he knew any software developers locally. That job led me to meet someone who left to start a company, and I followed. There I met one of the co-founders of my next startup. That startup hired a lawyer who later went on to hire me for one of his startups. The co-founder of that startup hired me for my current job.

There have been interludes that did not follow so directly, and there are certainly things I've done to help things along, but there are also many more examples of luck involved along the way too. I'm sure I could have gotten a lot less lucky and still done ok, or been more lucky and done better, but overall I've come out of a lot of things disproportionately well.

The initial part has a large element of luck, but to be fair it was also because your co-founder was busy networking in public spaces.

And most of the events after that sound like the fruits of being skilled, agreeable and available.

Luck played a part, but don't sell yourself short. :)

While skill etc. certainly also played a part - I'm not in any way suggesting that luck is sufficient -, my point was that most of these were intertwined in a way that meant they were dependent on that first domino. I probably would have done fine without it, but it'd have looked very different.

Even though my skills certainly also played a role, I could also have been equally skilled and taken another job and missed out on meeting the right people and ended up with far less satisfying outcomes. And many do. Or I could have been born somewhere where I wouldn't have had the same opportunities.

Luck and skill amplify each other, and a problem is that people often want to think it was all down to their skills. A lot of subsequent failures happen when people fail to learn the right lessons because they don't understand which parts of their earlier successes were down to luck and so try to copy the same approach in different conditions.

So what you’re saying is that I should Always Be Grocery Shopping? Because you never know who you’ll meet there.

No, don’t worry about taking the time to reply & say that of course that’s what you mean. I’m already halfway through dictating a blogpost on my way to the grocery store right now. Thank you, I never would have seen it as the rich business networking venue it clearly is without your insight.

idk if you're joking, but urbanist writer James Kunstler points out that grocery stores are the only place in the suburbs where you can actually have a spontaneous interaction with your neighbors. Maybe ymmv but in the suburb where I live, there are no sidewalks and like 1-to-3 people walk by per day.

> My advice: get lucky.

That's actually great and actionable advice. The more draws you have the better chances you get to luck out.

The actionable part is the draw participation and you participate with your each interaction multiplied with your relevancy surface.

Do you know who did not luck out with your former manager? Those who did not had a company that does the things you do and those who might have had but did not interact with your ex manager.

IMHO lucking out is a very straightforward strategy and is relevant not only in business but in romantic relationships or friendships or any other partnerships.

Just don't expect to luck out on your first try and multiple participations is much easier than trying to design the luck on first try.

Note: you had to be kind and nice enough for the former boss to care enough to:

- ask you to email

- read it and understand what you do

- follow up and spend the company's money

edit: simplicity

And the "get lucky" transforms in "build a network"

One of my friends went to space and had her life radically changed last year, and the opportunity entirely arose from the fact that she is one of the kindest and nicest people you will ever meet, and if you were tasked with filling the seat on that rocket, she'd be on the top of your list.

She got "lucky" in the sense that narrowly surviving bone cancer as a kid gave her a compelling story, but it's everything she did after getting cancer, and her conviction to follow her dreams, which led to the opportunity.

I saw the netflix documentary about that mission and Hayley was basically the main character.

That documentary was pretty good. It's awesome seeing her leverage the whole situation, interviewing with so many people, joining the SpaceX medical team, she really took the inspiration part of inspiration 4 seriously. Both her and her brother are very kind, her brother is decent at smash bros too.

"Get lucky" is solid advice, but you've also got to give luck something to work with. I think your overnight success started a long time ago, at least as far back as when you showed your manager you weren't a bozo.

Of course but there's no insight there. It's just, be smart, study and learn a lot, maintain a decent appearance, work hard on useful or interesting things, kep stretching and growing to new things, make friends, keep in touch, ask to get paid for you work. Completely normal "middle class / entrepreneur values" type stuff.

>Walking out of the grocery store one night after work, I passed by my former manager when I was an intern.

Not sure if 100% luck because I usually switch to the sidewalk other side of the road when i spot someone i know coming down the sidewalk that i know :D

While most would call it luck, most self-help "insight porn" from the 1800s would say it is "fortunate" because you are in control of influencing it with your previous actions.

If a complete stranger became your big customer from the same scenario, that would be luck.

Can we stop pretending theses things aren't luck?

Sure, there's merit involved - but that's a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. There's a million competent people having basically the same drive and capability. The thing that makes a difference is luck. Period.

Please note: this doesn't mean that succesful people don't deserve the success - most times they do. It's just that there are many more people, equally deserving, that didn't have the same success. Let's treat those people better.

The word fortunate includes an aspect of luck.

Successful people are successful because they put themselves out into the world to expand their fortune. They seize common opportunities and make them great. Those opportunities come back around like the original comment.

The whole idea of "building one's fortune" or having a "fortune be told" instills in the idea that your actions are what influences your chance of being lucky in a positive light(never negative).

What if your actions are also a byproduct of luck?

E.g. if one is born retarded or with another mental disability, that prevents them from the actions that increase the chances of luck occurrence. A less extreme example is a person born with dysthymia who possesses less of the mental energy required to put themselves out there to expand their fortune and become successful.

Conversely, if one is lucky enough to be born with high innate intelligence and drive, coupled with a good upbringing and role models, they will more likely engage in actions that bring about luck and success.

One might argue that in many cases, people are not beholden to their genetics/circumstances and can rise above them. A dysthymic person can put forth the effort to get the help they need. I might argue that even this is a byproduct of luck in that the person was lucky enough to not have an incurable form of depression and also was lucky to have access to the resources to overcome it.

> The word fortunate includes an aspect of luck.

Yeah, I think that was what the GP meant: ~ "Back then, people could admit that it's largely a matter of luck."

If "luck" is a dirty word in the startup world, I would at least like acknowledgement that the pathways to success are frequently not replicable.

Sure, nothing is certain, but some career paths are much more replicable than others. Maybe not everyone can work at a FAANGAMMATRON, there's a certain amount of luck, but "get a big tech job, work it for twenty-thirty-forty years" is still a fairly replicable path to moderate wealth.

You can look at the types of actions people took to get a big tech job (probably either "attend a prestigious university, apply straight to big tech" or "attend a decent state university, work any job in between for experience, apply to big tech") and there's probably a double-digit percent chance of you being able to replicate it.

You take any of the paths founders took to a successful company, it's almost impossible you'd achieve the same outcome trying to replicate it.

> You can look at the types of actions people took to get a big tech job (...) and there's probably a double-digit percent chance of you being able to replicate it.

You think more than 700 million people can get a big tech job?

... X0% of the people who can replicate the path, can replicate the results, is the guess I'm pulling out of my ass. Not X0% of the global population.

So who can replicate the path? The lucky ones?

It's always easy to say it's luck. But I don't think it is. You created opportunity. And that's the key thing. Create opportunities. As many as possible. I did something similar. Started with a dollar a day. Ended up with several thousands a day. The only thing I consider luck is the fact that a grew up in a stable family in a rich country where I got faced with computers at a very early age. I received enough time to explore my desires. Never felt any pressure or whatsoever. But the businesses I created where my own work.

There's an irony that people don't even recognise that they are already relatively more wealthy than much of the world when talking about "rich people".

We do create our own luck to a certain degree and for anyone born in a first world country we have so many opportunities all around us - many simply choose poorly.

It's astounding that you try to spin this as him "creating opportunity". This is dumb luck, plain and simple.

Solid advice, yeah get lucky. No shortcuts.

Question: did you get the idea for your startup while doing your internship?

Perhaps the advice is: do more internships :)

how about "make your own luck"? so that way you don't have to fear the uncertainty of luck!?

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