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Comment by hylaride | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs was connected: By being raised in Silicon Valley at just the right time. He even had a story (who knows how true it is) of him as a kid looking up Bill Hewlett in the phone book and asking about electronics parts (a frequency counter IIRC) and Bill not only got him the part, but gave him a summer job.

As for business, many successful tech entrepreneurs “learn” it either as they go or by bringing on business experts, but not giving them full control. For larger examples of the latter, see Eric Schmidt as the “adult in the room” for Google, Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook.

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If you had to look up someone in the phone book you by definition aren't connected.

Connected is when your Mom knows the chairman of IBM. Like with Gates.

To add: most people didn't dare to just do that. Cold calling is a real skill, the biggest factor of being good at it is: having the courage to do it.

Yeah, I know there’s a difference. It’s not the same as Bill Gates, but proximity is a connection all its own.

By that logic any entrepreneur can just scrape together a few bucks and ride a bus straight to San Francisco.

I find it easier to just consider Steve Jobs to be exceptional here. He's the definition of not letting the circumstances of your birth dictate anything.

Steve Jobs was absolutely exceptional, but there's a good chance we'd have never heard of him if he grew up on a farm in the 1960s/70s midwest and never ran into Woz (who also benefited from proximity to electronics), got inside XEROX/PARC, or was exposed to calligraphy in the college he dropped out of.

Jobs has said himself on multiple occasions that he was lucky with timing and proximity to the industry and people, not that it lessens the immense grit that was still needed.

Ok, and I'm also lucky I wasn't born in village undergoing famine.

I haven't created any billion dollar companies yet, have you?

Nope, but I don't consider myself exceptional either. shrug

You have the agency to try to contact powerful people too, but you don’t.

That's true. It feels like every other ladder-climbing wannabe out there is also trying to attract powerful people's attention on Twitter et al these days, so I imagine it's much harder to stand out than it was for a kid in the 1970s. But you're not wrong.

I agree it probably was easier once you knew where to find them. Almost every celebrity is accessible through the internet if your megaphone is loud enough.

I also don’t claim to make such effort. I just want to clarify that networking is a conscious skill and not always a result of family connections.

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