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Comment by jollofricepeas | Hacker News Reader

This is stupid.

Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous.

What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success.

The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff.

1. have a good team and hire right. you need just three roles: sales, operation and product.

2. TAM is real and will determine the size you can grow your business.

3. focus on sales first literally. as a founder you should do your own selling. take care of your customers!!!

4. don’t be a crook

5. manage your money right; be cheap.

6. grow where you’re planted. dig deep in areas you know or that your personal networks know.

7. be lucky - this is about timing and also putting yourself in a place to have information first or at least know the value of certain information first.

8. know you’re going to get it wrong sometime and fail; when that happens take a small break and then spin up another

I’ve bootstrapped two companies to success in my eyes which has changed me and my families life.

The first was in the 2000s out of college (~$500k annual) it eventually petered out then in the 2010s (~$5m annual). Now I’m going to do another and I hope to create a $5-10m company all off the advice of other entrepreneurs.

I’ve also failed miserably and had 5-7 business go under or never even really get off the ground.

View on HN

Honestly it just looks to me like the lottery you won is not "having a successful business", but "having the luxury and connections to try and fail 5-7 times with one success"

Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.

Yeah, this is one of the things that drives me nuts about these "inspirational" stories where some millionaire/billionaire talks proudly about how their first business failed, their car was repo'd, bank foreclosed on them, etc... but I've never heard one talk about what they did between that and the successful business. Where did they sleep? How did they afford food?

Varies but mostly you go get a job for a while.

The secret is that sometimes you just have to ... sigh ... work.

Of course.

We work jobs and do our thing on the side like most traditional American entrepreneurs do until their business gets off the ground.

Who the hell is bootstrapping businesses without a job besides rich kids?

1. Get a cheap apartment in a slightly sketchy neighborhood

2. Work 7-8 hours at work and every other waking hour on your business. Take meetings during lunch.

3. Focus to the point of cutting out sports, video games, bars and other frivolous shit until you’ve made progress. Don’t date if you can.

Discipline wins the race.

And when you fail; which you will.

Do it all over again until you find success.

There is a parable I can't remember. The gist is as follows.

A man/woman has a nice life, a cheap apartment in an okay neighbourhood. Their 9-5 job isn't particularly exciting or well-paid; however, at the weekend, it allows them to enjoy sports, video games and other frivolous activities, such as dating and hanging out with their partner or children.

A stranger approaches them and says they make a much better life for themselves. He tells them they just need to get a cheap apartment in a sketchy neighbourhood, work all waking hours of the day, and give up any fun until they make it. They may fail five times until they succeed and may be declared bankrupt.

After listening, they ask what their life looks like after they make it. He answers it allows them to have an okay apartment in a more expensive neighbourhood, and they can enjoy sports, video games and other frivolous activities, such as dating and hanging out with their partner or children.

They smile at the stranger, and say "But I already have most of this right now". The stranger walks off wearily.

The parable is about a fisher

Do you happen to have an URL to the parable?

I was confusing it with a man sitting below an olive tree, maybe a variant of the fisher one.

https://joneytalks.medium.com/the-parable-of-the-mexican-fis...

…And that is the difference my friend.

This is life.

Life is inequality.

Not everyone is meant to be an entrepreneur or has the desire to do what it takes to become one.

Trying to convince someone to become an entrepreneur is like trying to convince someone to become a professional athlete or musician.

You must sacrifice frivolity for excellence.

But excellence can always dabble in frivolity.

The choice is ours to make.

It is a misconception you need to sacrifice frivolity for excellence.

Sounds like fun?

> Do it all over again until you find success.

For which you may have to be somewhat lucky

Indeed. I’m not an entrepreneur or anything but liken it a bit to having a good initial poker hand - you can win with one good card but it is helpful and gives one more options to have two good cards.

So in the context of bootstrapping a company it’s helpful to have a legit fallback (way to suck it up and find an OK job) when things don’t pan out.

Edit: maybe this is obvious for CS/software folks but the extracurricular work I’m involved with is not exactly tech related, though my day job is coding

> Where did they sleep?

Maybe at least one of their parents had a sofa.

The trick is to have parents who aren't homeless.

Having a strong support group in your life is probably one of the most important things to success.

Few paths go straight from a to b without a misstep.

> Having a strong support group in your life is probably one of the most important things to success.

This. “It's not what you know its who you know.” Though often the people who give that advice privately are the most invested in maintaining the illusion of meritocracy publicly.

Here's how I fare on that. Each checked box is something I have.

[X] "The trick is to have parents",

[ ] who are alive,

[ ] "who aren't homeless",

[ ] who have housing that is safe and functional,

[ ] who have room for you not already occupied by other family members in greater need,

[ ] who "had a sofa",

[ ] or if they're dead, at least left you with enough money as an equivalent

Who live nearby. If you're an immigrant and your parents live another continent, hard to live on their sofa and then get a new visa to come back.

I'm never sure what to do with this class of comment - it reminds me of guys who say they can't get a girlfriend because they're 5'8".

(Also, you forgot people whose parents are able-but-unwilling. This also sometimes makes some things harder than they would be, compared to, say, being given fistfulls of cash each weekend by your rich parents who have a sofa AND a bed.)

This works a lot better if you have parents that live in Palo Alto or SF compared to Tulsa, OK.

To the original post, I generally agree. There are some fundamental lessons about business you can learn, and if you follow them, have a better chance of success. But the magnitude of that success largely comes down to luck. There's plenty of thought leaders out there that just happened to join the right company at the right time. Much of their success is "beta" rather than "alpha", but they are treated like they have unique insight to drive amazing outcomes.

They do talk about that.

Elon Musk cleaned out manure tanks for a while in Canada if I'm not mistaking. There are some interviews where he talks about this (and showering at the gym across the street and sleeping under a desk and having no money) in quite some detail.

Doesn’t he come from a South-African diamond family or something?

If Wikipedia or Snopes are to be believed on the matter (and I really don’t know anymore), this is way overblown. Mines (emerald, not diamond btw) are cheaper than you think. If my dad buys half of a tiny mine in his retirement I’ll start walking around claiming I’m from a mine owning family!

The story of how he even got to own the mine sounds pretty wild:

“According to the story, in the mid-1980s, Errol and a copilot landed their plane near Lake Tanganyika in Zambia, where "a group of Italians" offered them 80,000 pounds in British currency in order to buy the plane.

Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?

"I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."”

It proceeds to say he made about $400000 from the mine in total - hardly a billionaire villain level money.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...

I think the null hypothesis that Musk got lucky in the dotcom era is pretty reasonable, lots of people did. I don’t get all the conspiracy theories.

> It proceeds to say he made about $400000 from the mine in total - hardly a billionaire villain level money.

Just to clarify for anyone else wondering, that’s 400,000USD inflation adjusted for 2021. Converted to South African rand, it’s about 7.2 million.

To put that in context, the average home price in South Africa is about a million rand. So at most they would have been able to buy 7 properties. If they bought in an expensive area, they likely would have only been able to afford 4 or 5.

> Converted to South African rand, it’s about 7.2 million.

> To put that in context, the average home price in South Africa is about a million rand. So at most they would have been able to buy 7 properties

That’s... not how averages work.

If a house costs a million rand, and you have 7 million, then you can buy 7 of them, right? What am I missing?

If an average house costs a million rand, and you have 7 million rand, 7 properties is not the maximum you could buy.

(If the minimum price was a million rand, then 7 would be the maximum.)

Oh, I didn’t realise I wrote “at most”. You’re right, that was incorrect.

He also had substantially wealthy parents if I'm not mistaken. Same with Gates and others. This is the ultimate safety net.

It's easier to take risks when you have an out when it all goes really wrong. Doubt he'd still be cleaning manure today if he hadn't had a success...

I'm reminded of the song Common People by Pulp:

"But still you'll never get it right/'Cause when you're laying in bed at night/Watching roaches climb the wall/If you called your dad he could stop it all."

The album in general holds up well, good stuff.

This was basically Memnoch The Devil's [0] argument against the legitimacy of Jesus Christ's sacrifice - it didn't count, because he did it with full knowledge of his own immortality. Through crucifixion he suffered and died, but he never faced the existential dread that plagues humankind, and therefore giving up his own life was an inauthentic act.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memnoch_the_Devil

His family was rich he is as self made as Trump.

He comes from emerald wealth in South Africa for christ sake. Maybe he cleaned manure, but not out of dire need

Given that the mine was worth 40,000 pounds and stopped producing in 1989 it wasn't exactly a great source of wealth.

It's more that he came from such wealth that his family could acquire a nontrivial share in an emerald mine on what amounted to a whim.

> Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?

> "I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."

https://www.news24.com/news24/bi-archive/how-elon-musks-fami...

Anybody who considers 80,000 pounds to be riches is not very wealthy.

It's 80,000 pounds dropped on a whim, not that they simply had 80k total. That is wealthy.

It's not on a whim, it's how Errol lived his entire life. Chasing "Get Rich Quick" schemes is not typically a sign of wealth.

The ability to move non trivial amounts of capital on a whim is the very definition of wealth.

> Chasing "Get Rich Quick" schemes is not typically a sign of wealth.

I've found it to be pretty common. The amount of dumb money seeking 'easy' ways to multiply flowing around silicon valley kind of defines the place.

right, also we don't like hearing stories about all the entrepreneurs who failed to find success, and slipped into impoverished obscurity. How many kids are sitting in the back seat of the car, lamenting "I could have been a contender" you know? You don't hang out with the ones who failed to keep their heads above water, because you're afraid they're going to drown you too.

That sort of depends whether they cost a lot of money to start or just cost time (e.g. software written on the weekends).

What website do you think you're on? Anybody who is a competent software developer can.

This is a little pessimistic.

Just take smaller risks. I built my first business over nights and weekends and didn’t quit my day job for 5 years.

If you want something bad enough you just have to take the chance.

Yes “because wanting something bad enough” is the key to success…

It is a necessary but insufficient step.

Not if you have the connections and funding to start on third base where you can afford not to work and start your business on the side and hire enough people where you don’t have to work hard.

I worked for a startup before my current job where the founders - two brothers - had connections with the governor of a state in the Midwest to get a grant to start a small health care company. Neither of them were technical. They hired a few people in the state as basically QA and then hired a full stack consulting company that did the design, the project management and the development by hiring cheaper labor from India.

Then when they started getting enough revenue, they started bringing the technical skills in house including hiring a very good CTO.

The CTO then hired me as his third technical hire to oversee the “cloud application modernization” initiatives because they wanted to sell access to their micro services to large health care providers.

They sold the company three years after I was hired for 10x revenue. It was only $30 million. But the founders and the CTO I assumed made out well.

I think the people who had been there the longest made in the low six figures. I left ten months earlier and didn’t exercise my options. I might have left about $60K on the table.

Please play the worlds smallest fiddle for me. My next job after leaving the 60 person company was a remote job working at $BigTech in the cloud consulting department where my two year prorated signing bonus was $nice.

Yes some people have it easy. We have all seen this tons of times in life.

So stop comparing yourself to other people. Nobody starts at the same place.

And that’s the entire purpose of the article. “I pulled myself by own bootstraps by calling my parents and asking them to write me a very large check and to put me in contact with someone who could give me a path in”

Play the cards you’re dealt

For every trust funder with a garage but in Atherton, there are 10 other trust funder with substance abuse problems doing nothing with their life

I can respect people that play their cards, I dont resent people that had a better hand

I try not to resent people that had a better hand, but when they pretend they just worked harder or are just better than me I tend to get annoyed.

Sure, yeah a lot of them are oblivious because of the conscious effort they still had to make. I don't think people need to make disclaimers about all the privilege they recognize they had, that's pretty performative.

I think it is up to everyone else to recognize the barriers to entry. In feudal society everyone knew that.

My Digital Ocean cost is about $25 plus another $20(?) for mail provider.

If $45 per month is unachievable then what on Earth are you doing with your money?!

>Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.

That’s not true in my experience. I’m a similar case, have started 8 businesses in 30 years. Most have had some level of success: enough pay my employees and provide good healthcare while also making a (often small) profit. I’ve also had 2 exits, one of which generatied a life-changing amount of money for my co-founder and myself. Of the 6 business that did not exit, 2 failed to start, 2 achieved multi-million dollar revenue levels then failed, 2 somewhere in the middle.

In between startups I worked for other companies. I tried to optimize $/hr while I did, rebuilding my reserves and even my credit (lost everything once)

Working for others after a failed startup has many benefits. You look at company leadership differently. You observe. You learn. You make more connections. You see more market opportunities. You get inspired. You try again.

Probably key in being able to do this cycle well is to not let the businesses get over leveraged. I’ve had both funded and non-funded businesses. I’ve gone nearly broke a couple of times but a big part of learning to be an entrepreneur is learning to manage money.

I'd assume "most people" refers to the average (assuming American) person that likely has tens of thousands of dollars of debt and works a job (or three) that can sustain them only by not fully servicing that debt. Putting time and money into a business venture means putting all they have on the line; failure means "skin of the teeth" living for some decades, if they can survive some winters outside.

Just a comment on this. Congratulations on exiting with "life-changing money". But I think germane to this comment would be the order in which these companies were tried and succeeded or failed would be relevant.

I assume your first venture was not the "life-changing money" venture, and the impact of when that did happen certainly can change the narrative of the rest of the businesses in regards to risk taking, particularly if it was not the last venture that was greatly successful.

It’s called survivorship bias

There's also a lot of survivorship bias. We don't hear about the entrepreneurs who had X failures and no successful exits. There must be some (a lot?)

Yes, there are surprisingly few people here owning up they failed trying and are now working in a Mcdonalds' or Wendy's

This! And also. Going to the right schools. Not having trouble with school. Being from a stable wealthy family etc etc.

Just wow. This is not that hard.

How much money are people sinking into micro-SaaS in 2023?

If you live in a cheap place, get a decent job, then you can save money which you can use to start a business.

It costs literally $50 to get a LLC from your local Secretary of State or equivalent. You can do it yourself…like tomorrow.

Your chances of making it to Elon Musk status are slim, but there’s literally no excuse in America to not spin up an LLC by tomorrow, get a free EIN, open a bank account for FREE, throw up a landing page and start interacting with potential customers…

…in literally days.

That’s how you do it!

Sounds good, but who are my potential customers?

If I follow the "scratch your own itch" advice I ultimately fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a better register allocation algorithm for 6502 C compilers.

If I follow the "put yourself in the future and build that" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a library capable of guaranteed constant-time computation.

If I follow the "build products for your niche hobby community" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a better than state-of-the-art comb filter designed for NTSC laserdiscs.

If I follow the "capitalize on new trends in tech" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. an ML model trained to invert audio cassette dub generational fidelity loss.

How do you figure out what people want when you're very, very, very different from most people?

Trying to form an entire business around some small bit of technology is a non-started, imo. Focus on one area (eg the 6052 uc), blog with passion about what you're doing, build a following, and start up a Patreon. The long tail of the Internet enables business models that target tiny niches, so the cassette heads can find each other, and subsidize the creator of an ML model trained to invert audio cassette dub generational fidelity loss.

It's a scary leap to make, but if you can pay some bills following your passion, making things you need to build, then I'd call that a win.

I failed and survived. Charged up $70k on my HELOC and paid it all back.

You won the lottery in the sense that you went to college, live in a well-off english speaking country and as such, can burn through 5-7 failures. I'm sure you're smart and hard working, and I don't believe in shaming gringos as if being born rich (e.g. having access to a toilet and clean water) was their own fault. You deserve to be happy with what you have. But will never get to be preachy about it without some one calling you out, unless you surround yourself with people with the same biases.

You're making a lot of assumptions.

No they're not. Just the self-admitted fact that they could afford to fail 5-7 times creating a business shows that they had more social and financial safety net than an average American. Most Americans can't just create a business, fail, and repeat it 4-6 more times.

[1] is interesting - suggests that 32% of American adults getting a surprise $400 bill would require them to borrow, sell something, or be unable to pay it.

Which is quite the statistic when you think about it.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2022-economic-we...

Do we know that these failures weren't after (and paid for by) the first succes?

Most gringos can not burn through a single failure, let alone 5-7. This helps to explain why the US Military is as large as it is...

What a heartbreaking comment to read:

> Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous.

> I’ve also failed miserably and had 5-7 business go under or never even really get off the ground.

This means that you incurred (2+) / ((2+) + (5-7)) chance of creating a successful business. This is in the spirit of the OP. Creating a business may involve some skill, but ultimately it's just a lottery. Sometimes you win only because you're lucky. Or something you lose only because you're unlucky. I apologize but I truly do think giving advise like this can be dangerous. Not everyone is as privileged and maybe a single failure can put them in life-long debt, or financial trouble, or homelessness.

I disagree. I’ve also failed multiple times but achieved what for me is a satisfying level of success in the process.

As a ratio I’ve failed a lot more than I’ve won but it is not a lottery.

It’s more like a golf game, it’s hard to do well but you do learn and improve with each attempt.

That's exactly the lottery. The fact that you can play multiple rounds of "golf" is the privilege that the OP is talking about. You are lucky enough to be able to afford buying multiple lottery tickets and some hit the jackpot.

Most people will never even have the opportunity to afford one lottery ticket.

Then life, not business is the lottery.

The lottery idea works in the sense that I was born in the U.S. rather than a developing country AND my parents, who were far from rich or even stable at times still were able to afford a family computer (thank you Atari 520ST) which was very fortunate since my formal education ended the 3rd time I was expelled from high school.

Yes, from the life perspective, as opposed to a worst-case (even in the U.S) I most certainly am privileged and lucky, and did certainly win a lottery of sorts. You’re absolutely correct.

Having said that, most of us that work in tech have won that same or a similar lottery.

Life, location, family, stability, yes those things are a bit of a lottery.

But not so for startups. Your odds of winning the lottery never increase. Your odds of winning in business do, as long as you learn from your failures.

> As a ratio I’ve failed a lot more than I’ve won but it is not a lottery.

It may not be precisely a lottery, but if most of the successful people are “I’ve failed a lot more thab I’ve won”, then, the ability to afford to fail a lot more than you win.

Especially with the narratives where the failures involve periods of homelessness, etc., possibly mitigate by couch-surfing or other network support—having a network that mitigates in that way is fortune. Surviving homelessness without it in a way that lets you to buy another totally-not-a-lottery-ticket at business? Even more a matter of fortune.

I agree that measure of success is relative and like the principles you list, but your reply lands reinforcing the point of the tweet.

Does 2 out of 9 successful startups mean your tenets listed here will lead to your level of success 22% of the time? Or do they only lead to success 0.022% of the time and you're the 1 out of 5000? How do you know?

It's not just this topic, it's a problem with general advice humans give to other humans without applying any specific context.

While I don’t agree with the premise of the tweet, having created 2 successful businesses doesn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t all luck, because you’re missing the fact that the number of entrepreneurs, who would be the equivalent of the lottery contestants, is highly limited.

If you had a daily lottery but only 1000 people were able to enter it, by year 5 nearly everyone would have won the lottery at least twice.

Yeah that is why he said it is a bit of a lottery. 2 of 9 seems like a pretty solid success rate but that means even you (someone who has a knack for it) would need 4 solid efforts to have good odds at getting a winner. 4 failed attempts is going to burn most people out emotionally if not financially.

Was your first successful business one of your first ones? What if it had taken you until your 6th try to get a winner? Would you have stuck it out?

You are precisely demonstrating the original post, no?

You had 2 of 9 businesses succeed. You are demonstrating roughly 1:5 odds of rolling a successful business.

With 1:5 odds if we reroll you doing 10 businesses over and over, 10% of you never succeed. About 1/3 of you win once, 1/3 of you win twice, and 20% of you win 3 times.

The versions of you that won 3 times are not any different than the versions of you who won never. Any advice you give is neither more accurate because a version of you won 3 times nor less accurate because a version of you won never.

Those are not the odds, just his success rate.

If you do everything badly (i.e. come up with bad business ides, cannot implement even those bad ideas, are bad at hiring, managing money, paying taxes etc.) then your success rate will be 0%, not 20%.

The issue here isn't about how hard starting a business is. It's obviously hard enough that many (most?) people who try will fail.

The issue is: can you do things better? Is doing things better lead to higher probability of success?

The "it's all luck" people say that you can't. There is no better or worse way. It's just luck. Therefore any advice is useless.

The opposite point of view is: yes. There are better and worse ways of doing things. And if you know what they are then you can tell other people. And that advice will help them to achieve success. But not guarantee.

I think one of the main problems is that for a lot of people, starting a business basically has a 0% chance of success.

Some people may be able to increase their chances, but maybe not everyone.

"but not guarantee" is almost the entire point of what folks are pointing out and what the OP meant - you could do literally everything perfect and still it's VERY likely you will fail.

Michael Sandel’s “meritocracy trap”, exhibit A.

>7. be lucky

You have to make absolute certain that you remember to do this step and to do it correctly, as well as at the right time, or it won't work.

I’ve bootstrapped two companies to success in my eyes which has changed me and my families life.
…

I’ve also failed miserably and had 5-7 business go under or never even really get off the ground.

All other things being equal, I’d expect someone who started 8 businesses and had one mild and one moderate success to have more useful insights to offer than someone who started one business and had it become wildly successful. Yet our culture valorizes the latter to extreme extents.

Perhaps that was what “awinkinson” was trying to get at with his pithy comment on that terrible platform.

The tweet is a hyperbole, but it points at the important role of luck and survivorship bias.

It is clear that given the dimensions of skill and luck, the most success will come from having both. If you lack either skill or luck, you will automatically be at a disadvantage compared to those who have both. This implies that the most prominent success stories are the result of luck as much as of anything else. However that isn’t very often mentioned in those stories.

You can do all of this and still fail. Many well-run start-ups fail because of market conditions. There is a lot of luck involved.

I think it’s probably right that some people are better at running successful startups than others. They might be more willing to try / fail, have better ideas, etc, and it isn’t just stuff like having good connections to funding.

I think it could still be true that the advice isn’t very good but not for the reason the tweet gives (I agree the tweet is stupid). In particular, I think there could be a lot of tacit things that aren’t really expressed in advice, especially the ‘startup influencer’ types who give out advice on twitter. For example, it might be that being really good at hiring and having people work on the right thing is a key skill and a successful founder might think they just walked around the office and asked obvious questions without being able to write down what exactly it was they did to steer the company in the right direction.

Unless your startup was profitable before you sold it, it could just as well be luck and connections and not skill. It takes a lot more skill to run a “profitable” business.

I wander how many of those “successful” startups will be successful when they can’t spend years living off of VC funding?

+1. I have 3 IPOs and numerous acquisitions, across multiple industries. It's still 50/50 but that's way better than the long odds most people face.

Also agree that it depends on your goals! I've done venture capital deals, self funded deals ("lifestyle"), non-profit & political campaigns, etc - and different stages and goals.

Obviously YMMV: I know people who legit get lucky and then their luck runs out, and I know smart guys who do everything right and can't catch a break.

It's also fun to angel invest. Get to see dozens more companies from (a bit) of the inside.

Did you found those IPOs and acquisition startups? That’s very impressive if so!

thanks. I was very early, but not a founder of the IPOs. If you have access to dealflow and add value (e.g. as staff, investor or adviser), then it's much easier to "pick winners" and let others take the bigger risks and enjoy the billionaire lifestyle. By valley standards, I'm a small but respected player.

Could you explain this a little more? I've worked in early stage startups for almost eight years and had 1 minor acquisition where I got barely anything. I'd love to look into this 'targeted approach' you mention.

You are rightfully being pilloried. At age 40+ you really need to have more wisdom.

Luck is involved in everything because whatever you have decided, it’s not a sure shot of winning. The decision to make the product a certain way for example, or certain timing, marketing spend etc and all of them matter

The chance of the average CS grad - well at least until this year - of being able to “grind leetcode and working for a FAANG” (c) r/cscareerquestions and ending up with over 1 million dollars of before tax “profits” in four years is much greater than your average “startup founder” that’s not even counting the risk premium.

And yes I’m far away from a new college grad.

Yeah, first finding out this is a way to game the software engineer hiring system and having the believe to go “all in” and try if one of the company’s stupid enough to hire mostly based on that fact

You realize that is the way to get in all of the best paying companies as a software engineer?

No I didn’t do it. But I have 25 years of experience in the industry and was able to get a remote role via a slight pivot.

All of that seems very "necessary but not sufficient." The fact you had multiple businesses fail seems strongly to argue for that: presumably you didn't violate any of the above points when you failed?

What was the revenue of the 2nd bootstrapped success?

I think they mean it was $5 million. The same sentence seems to be talking about both of them, but would be clearer broken into two before "then".

I'm interpreting it as "The first was in the 2000s out of college (~$500k annual); it eventually petered out. Then [the second was] in the 2010s (~$5m annual)."

Another lesson is

9. If when you pitch your original idea to potential customers, if they're not over the moon about it your destined for failure.

What’s TAM?

Total Addressable Market.

Total addressable market

Or “the $x market is one quadrillion dollars if we just capture 1% the company will be worth billions” - or the first slide of the pitch deck of every startup seeking venture capital.

It’s a WAG

The point is you still got lucky. Something helped you beyond doing hard work.

That there are successful entrepreneurs, or that some of them may give good advice, doesn't mean that he doesn't have a valid point about entrepreneurial advice as a genre.

I think there are three keys to the problem: 1) readers want feel-good success stories, 2) successful people strongly benefit from positive PR, and 3) people often can't usefully talk about why they succeeded.

The first, I think, is pretty obvious. The Hero's Journey long predates modern capitalism, but it very much gets applied. On top of that, add that readers want to feel positive, powerful, smart, enabled. So you can't just tell them, "Sure, you'd like to be rich like this guy, but take it from me, you're fucked from the get-go." There's a good critique of the corporate bio that relates: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/02/11/jeff-john-ro...

The second bit means that business heroes are not going to tell you, here's my secret: be born at least moderately wealthy and well connected. They aren't going to tell you that past a certain levehttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-... of wealth, it's basically impossible to go broke. They're instead going to make themselves seem both extraordinary and extra ordinary. See, e.g.: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-...

And the third is something I'm sure many here have experienced. I started coding as a child, the son of a software developer. When people ask me how to get started as a developer, the honest answer is: I have no fucking idea. I have little recollection of how I learned, and I have no idea whether the parts that were easy for me would be easy for anybody else. I'll be positive and encouraging and give vague general advice. But if I talked about what worked for me, it would be very much in the vein of "here's the lottery ticket number I used", because my path was so personal.

The third one resonates. As someone who also started coding at a young age, here’s what worked for me: 1. Have at least 10 free hours each week, 2. Get fanatically addicted to coding, 3. Repeat for 8 years and then do a four year CS degree. Pretty useless advice.

Apropos the article, it’s easy to imagine there’s a similar lottery for most paths in life, including entrepreneurship. “Be born rich enough that you have the innate confidence that the universe will bend to your will” is a lottery I didn’t win.

Surely, a kernel of the current political polarization is the left’s insistence that these lottery tickets matter, and the right’s insistence that the wealth they’re holding is the result of their own hard work. (To be clear, it’s a spectrum — tickets come in different sizes, and hard work plays a role — but such nuance has no place in public discourse)

> 7. be lucky

Yes, don't forget to be lucky. And don't forget to rewrite history once your idea is a success. If its a failure, its someone else's fault.

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