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Comment by nsguy | Hacker News Reader

These things always happen at intersections. There are lots of smart people with ideas. The magic happens at the intersection of ideas, time (what technology is available) and luck. Apple Newton was too early. Apple iPhone was just right. Doom 3D was just at the right time when commodity hardware could do what the amazing software needed it to do.

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The point I was trying to make is what are the situation where an independent small startup can make it big. Your examples are instructive, engineers were able to make id Software big because you didn't need a lot of hardware to invent 3D shooters, but Jobs gets the credit for the iPhone because the engineers needed hundreds of millions of dollars in capital to pull it off.

pg is giving advice based on him getting rich from that period of time where the small startup could make it big. But those conditions are probably rare going forward.

maybe. right now, if a startup has a new ML training technique or whatever, for a specific niche, cloud and VC capital will let them make a model that does way better for their niche than repackaging well funded models from OpenAI.

>is what are the situation where an independent small startup can make it big.

Yes, there are also all kinds of completely unrelated to your idea things that can succeed or kill your business.

Happen to launch your idea the day before a global economic collapse, well, better be exceptionally lucky.

Happen to launch when interest rates drop though the floor and banks are handing out money to anyone. You're going to have a harder time failing.

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