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Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

Based solely on what's in this article (perhaps reality is different), this reinforces my inkling that people get truly rich from mostly just two things: who you know, and marketing. Market yourself (or your product) well and know the right people, and you too can be the CEO of a vaporware company funded with more money than most people will see in their entire lives, while spending your months on sabbatical in Tahoe and Hawaii. Unbelievable. On the other hand, this is Techcrunch, and the reality is undoubtedly a little more nuanced than what's presented here.

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You're right, the reality is far more nuanced than what's presented here. Setting aside the current Color fiasco, Bill Nguyen is a highly accomplished entrepreneur with close to $1B worth of startup exits in his past [1][2]. To say that he's gotten rich from "who he knows", and "marketing" is spitting in the face to a guy who's built real genuine successes from scratch, when he was a nobody. He is not making off like a bandit with the current $41M investment. This is turning out to be a failure from which he will not benefit financially in any significant way.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Nguyen [2] http://www.fastcompany.com/1784823/bill-nguyen-boy-bubble

Is this wiki page for real?

"He grew up in Houston, the son of Vietnamese immigrants whom he says he consistently disappointed. They wanted him to score A's. Instead, he scored an unpredictable mix of A's and F's, and earned a 1.4 grade point average in his senior year. He was easily distracted and confused."

Pretty much sums it up.

I don't have a lot of faith in lionized history.

Before founding SEVEN, Mr. Nguyen founded Onebox.com in 1999. It was acquired for $850 million in 1999 by Phone.com (now part of Openwave)

-- Product of the bubble 1.0

http://investor.openwave.com/stocklookup.cfm?historic_Month=...

From 200 $358=> to $2 Today, so 2/358*850= $4.75million is the realized value of his company?

Sobriety and hindsight are sometimes clarifying.

>Based solely on what's in this article (perhaps reality is different), this reinforces my inkling that people get truly rich from mostly just two things: who you know, and marketing.

You're forgetting the most important one - already being rich, especially if it was through past entrepreneurial successes as in Bill's case [1].

[1]: http://www.crunchbase.com/person/bill-nguyen

must be nice!

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