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Comment by verelo | Hacker News Reader

if i had a 1 in 100 shot of becoming google I'd just do it 100 times. I'm pretty sure its more like 99.99999%

I think each earnest attempt would probably occupy about 3 years of your lifespan, so you probably can try at most 20 times. If these are independent, then it's still an 82% chance of failure. But successive attempts after repeated failures might also make it harder to attract confidence from investors, not to mention loss of your own self-confidence. And if you finally succeed in founding Google when you're 80, you might find that you don't have that much use for the money anymore, nor much interest in running Google.

Conversely, repeated failures can give you the experience needed to increase the odds that your next attempt could be successful.

Ask anyone who has ever failed at a startup before, how easy it is to get funding again. VC's would rather take a chance on someone they don't know vs. rip open old emotional bags with a failed founder.

As someone thats on startup #7 and is ~37 years old I can attest to this: I have had 5 flat out failures, 1 break even experience and 1 life changing experience (I don't own a private jet unfortunately). I'm fucking tired. I really hope theres something huge in the future, but the reality is I struggle to believe I have enough left in me to finish this one, let alone more.

Also, I'm just more interested in family and enjoying the mobility of the youth I have left, much more than chasing down unlimited resources.

It's closer to 63% (binomial distribution of 1% chance with 100 trials, P(X>=1) is 63.4%).

Fun fact, this converges quickly to 1-1/e ~ 0.632.

If you had a 1 in a million chance of winning something and you tried a million times, the chance of winning once is about 63.2%, not much different from when n=100.

The thing is you don't start with a 1:100 shot of becoming Google. You, hopefully, level up each shot you get. Your first shot, you'll probably make something no one wants. The second time, you can't figure out how to get anyone to pay attention to you. The third time, you can't get enough people to hand over their cash for it. The fourth time...

Each time, you learn and get better, your odds go up. Now the real question is whether your odds are going from 1:1000 to 1:100 or from 1:100 to 10:100?

You're mixing up percent that succeed (a statistic) with percent chance of success (a probability). IOW, the fact that 1% of businesses succeed does not mean that a particular business has a 1% chance of success. The reason is that business success is not a function of pure random chance (like a die roll). Sure there are random factors but there are also non-random factors (which, IMO, dominate). The problem is that there is no way to determine what your business's chance of success actually is.

I always wondered why people would ask to analyse the chances of a coinflip during logical interviews, according to you, after 2 flips you have both result happening? Its not like that, if you have 1 in 100 chances of making it, each time you re try you have a 1 in 100 chances

right, parent probably isn't aware of complement rule. Sibling comment properly calculated 63.4% probability of at least one success in 100 trials where each has 1% of success.

Parent here :) Yeah i am, but i think the thing few consider (although some did provide the remark here) was that while the chances are good (given infinite time), the reality is no one has that.

So yeah, give someone 500 years, hopefully they keep going at it and the odds play out...but in the lets call it 50 productive years I feel I probably have been given, plus a few distractions along the way, there are maybe 5-10 serious bets one can place? Feels like that needs to be considered in conjunction with the mathematical probability "just keep trying" misleads us to believe.

10 coin flips can happen in less time than it took to type this reply. Those odds are a little more predictable because of the time span involved.

That’s… not how that works.

Even if you can "try to be Google" once a year you'll still be over 80 on average when you hit ...

^^ this. As I've said to others, the math lines up looking promising, but now adjust for available time. It looks very different.

Apart from the math being off there, who do you know who has the time and resources to try and start 100 startups? Most people barely have the time and resources for 1.

Yeah so i didn't put it well, but that was literally my point. Feels very "developer brain" of us to say "thats technically possible, heres the math and you're thinking about it wrong" and not consider the human aspect.

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