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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg is no more a technology leader than a powerball winner is a financial leader.

He has worked hard, but no harder than many others.

He is brilliant, but not any more than many others.

He is tenacious, but not more than many others.

He was is the perfect storm of the right place at the right time on the right thing and played his hand beautifully. But he still hit the lottery.

The idea that lottery winners are suddenly Subject Matter Experts on other things just because they have money, eyeballs, connections, or whatever is silly. Out here in the diaspora, we pay little attention to the opinions of powerball winners. Too bad the same thing can't be said for the fanboys and followers in Silicon Valley.

This was inevitable.

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You would not say that if you knew him. I can tell you as both someone who does know him at least moderately well, and someone who knows a lot of other startup founders, that very few people indeed have his combination of brains and tenacity. I wish more did, because I'd love to be able to fund them, but Zucks are rare.

It's comforting to think that successful people were merely lucky, or became successful by underhanded tricks, but as I've said before, if you have to choose between two explanations and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, choose the other one.

I have to wonder how much of this is confirmation bias. There are lots of brilliant, tenacious people, but a tiny fraction of them are billionaires. Indeed, some of the most brilliant, single-mindedly tenacious people are doing relatively poorly remunerative things like toiling away as a professor in a mathematics department somewhere.

The question isn't whether Zuck is brilliant and tenacious, but rather whether you could pick him out of a lineup of 100 similarly brilliant and tenacious people who are nonetheless not billionaires.

Oddly enough I know for a fact that I'd identify him as a very promising founder. After 8 years of trying to pick founders, part of my brain has turned into a founder detector that I can no longer turn off, and the first few times I talked to Zuck, I found it hard to concentrate because I had to contend with a screeching Geiger counter in my head. Consciously, of course, I knew I couldn't fund him, but the Geiger counter isn't conscious.

I think there's a great deal of truth here, but it seems unfair to use the tendencies of Zuckerberg, after he already became successful and has had years of positive reinforcement of his abilities, as an example of why he was destined to be successful. I'm sure a lot of people who were just as tenacious as a young Zuckerberg, have become less so over the years after having failed many times and discouraged. Some of them will rebound and others won't. Perhaps Zuckerberg had a great deal to overcome, but as a distant observer, it seems that he's learned the right lessons early in part because his effort was validated.

A brilliant and tenacious person can fail due to bad luck, but you can't succeed at the billionaire level WITHOUT being brilliant and tenacious. So bad luck can be a factor, but good luck is not, really. Good luck might separate the billionaires from the millionaires, maybe.

Are you familiar with Richard Hamming's talk "You and your research"?

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

I'd contend that if a brilliant, tenacious person is doing relatively poorly remunerative things, it's because they're working on the wrong problems. Hamming writes:

"I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?''"

It's really easy to work on the wrong problems, either because you lack the courage to work on the right problem, or you don't know what the right problem is, or because your values don't line up with professional success. The first is regrettable, the second is hopefully temporary, and the third is fine. But if you want money and fame and all the other accouterments of success, and you're not working on an important problem, and you're not working on getting the courage to work on an important problem, and you're not trying to find the important problems - what are you doing? That's usually the situation that your hypothetical math mathematics professor is in.

I think "of your field" mightn't apply as much when it comes to tech entrepreneurship. Facebook didn't solve a CS problem, but it did solve a social problem. Airbnb too solved a travel problem rather than a CS problem.

"Of your field" applies to the market, not the technology, for startups. Facebook was in the college student market; they realized that the most important problem for college students was "I met this cute guy/girl at a party; how do I get laid?" and solved that problem. AirBnB is in the travel market; they realized the most important problem was "How do I find a place to stay cheaply?" and solved that problem.

Stating this is ego-protection at its finest. One of the finest comments I've ever read regarding this was written here, years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791800):

"This attitude bugs me a lot. There is probably a path for every single person in this country to make a million dollars in the next year if they were just "savvy enough" to take advantage of it. It seems everyone wants to diminish Zuck's success by ascribing luck to it, but let me tell you something. Zuck executed the shit out of Facebook. Did the community and mindshare just come out of thin air?

There's no good reason to believe that Zuckerberg is lucky at all. Saying he was in the right place at the right time has this tacit assumption that if he were somewhere else at the wrong time he would have tried the same thing and fell flat on his face.

It seems because Facebook is an outlier, people feel safe talking about the luck factor, but that's meaningless because we all exist with individual circumstances, and by that measure everything every one of us does is based on luck.

Instead, I prefer to ascribe luck to things that the individual actually had no control over, such as winning the lottery."

There is a funny joke about Bill and Hillary Clinton riding in the President's Limonsine when they pass by a gas station where Hillary's high school sweetheart is working. Bill says, "Look at that if you had stayed with that guy you'd be the wife of a gas station attendant." and she replies, "No, I'd still be the first lady."

There is luck involved with being successful, but there is also an ability to push it through. The recent comments by Bill Gates about how Microsoft did tablets way before Apple did, but they didn't have the design vision for them he did is a great example of that. I don't think the iPad would have been successful without its design, and that design wasn't "luck" it was deliberate. But the other parts of the equation were lucky (things like the PC market fading)

While I enjoyed your joke, I'm not sure how the PC market fading can be ascribed to luck? The rise of consumer demand of smart phones coupled with most PC's hitting a point of being "good enough" for the average consumer could be the cause. I'm not sure how that's luck. But I think most people in technology could have predicted that. I mean, it's pretty clear to me that this will happen for the next 10-20 years.

Computers as we know them today won't exist in the same form in 20 years, they'll primarily be powered by smart phones. But don't come back in 20 years and call this event and whatever successful company to profit on this "lucky"... it's just, who is going to execute upon this vision to make it happen? That's exactly what Apple did with tablets. They saw the future as it should be and executed upon that vision.

It's "luck" in the sense that the market randomly dumped phones, it's "luck" in the sense that the timing with general slowdown of netbooks and rise of smartphones was opening people up to the idea of a tablet, whereas in the early part of the century the mantra "why would I use it if I can't type on it" was dominating the discussion.

I think you give Apple a bit too much credit, they did well with the iPad, they did poorly with the Lisa 2 and the Newton and X-Serve. Product development from concept to product takes years. Someone can predict what they think will happen, and they can plan for it (which they do) but whether or not what they think will happen is what actually happens is controlled by forces they cannot control.

That's a little unfair.

Zuckerberg did win a lottery, quite right. If there was a room of 10,000 entreprenuers flipping coins, he flipped heads 100 times.

But it is not a fair toss - after the first few rounds those still in the game are a self-selecting group of people whose own biases more accurately match the new world than the average.

So when Zuckerberg and many of those who are still tossing, makes a new bet, a new toss, the odds he is choosing a path that will prove solid in the future is better than even.

One day his biases will lead him astray, afterall, there is no rational way to predict the future accurately. But if the bet is on "technology leadership" his biases so far are useful.

This is not to say his biases apply in DC, or that his biases are already out of date, but still, if technology leadership is finding a trail through the wilderness, his biases have at least lead through a thicket and found water at least once.

Of course the guy leading the Donner Party probably could say the same thing too.

Anyway, point is, his technology bet is "America needs immigrants". His political bet is "everyone will forgive me if I fix that". He may be right on technology, and wrong on politics - which I think is the main complaint. Does not make his technology bet wrong.

(personally I think its foolish to fix immigration for that reason - most people want to stay where they are and still work for facebook. And that is not an immigration problem)

A better analogy might be a poker tournament: no matter how brilliantly you play your hands, you'll still need to get lucky a few times.

Oh, I do agree that luck is a big component. In fact poker probably has too much skill and not enough luck.

But in the end, there is no analogy quite right - whatever future we are heading towards its going to be a surprise. Hopefully a nice, kids on Xmas day kind of surprise :-)

Maybe some people do get a D&D reworking of the Parc Xerox maxim : "point of view adds 80 Luck points" but I just felt "lottery winner" was a bit disparaging.

> The idea that lottery winners are suddenly Subject Matter Experts on other things just because they have money, eyeballs, connections, or whatever is silly. Out here in the diaspora, we pay little attention to the opinions of powerball winners. Too bad the same thing can't be said for the fanboys and followers in Silicon Valley.

While I don't disagree with you, I'll just point out that this behavior is a result of universal human biases and not anything unique to Silicon Valley. Have money? Fame? Ordinary people will care a great deal about what you say and do for those reasons alone. No kool aid required.

cas in point: Kardashians, Paris Hilton, etc etc

This is so true! If someone of no status made a joke, most people would likely said he's stupid. But if the same joke was made by Warren Buffet, the whole world would be 'amazed' by his wit.

I don't really disagree, but you could make that argument about virtually anyone. This is just the rhetoric we use about influential people, there's nothing notably different about this article. He's a "leader" in the sense of being able to direct resources and have his opinions spread by the media.

Exactly what I was going to say.

You can say this about literally anyone. Bill Gates? Psshh lottery winner. Who does he think he is going around and doing charity work. Anyone can do that if they won the lottery, he's not special.

See how easy it is to trivialize the accomplishments of other people?

Why do you think we are even having a conversation about Zuck? That's the same reason why he has the influence to have an impact on policy. Anything he says and does will be in the media, and he can use that power to make a difference in policy that he thinks will help the world. You might disagree, but he's in the position to do that, and its unfair to trivialize his accomplishments because of that.

The important thing is, he's TRYING to do something, whereas others won't even try because they're too scared to fail. Sure, his lobby could end up being an utter failure. But don't you think its awesome that he at least tried?

> You can say this about literally anyone. Bill Gates? Psshh lottery winner. Who does he think he is going around and doing charity work. Anyone can do that if they won the lottery, he's not special.

There is a big difference between going around doing charity work, and going around doing policy work. Bill Gate's charity work doesn't depend on his personal credibility, it depends on his money and his willingness to invest his personal time. Policy work inherently depends on the personal credibility of the person doing the lobbying. Therefore, it raises the question: why should we listen to what you say? And the answer can't just be: "because I have money."

I'd say being the leader of and building from scratch one of the most impactful companies in recent history is a pretty good credential.

You don't think he's learned a few lessons in the past 10 years that gives him some insight that's useful?

EDIT: Note that I'm not saying whether what he's lobbying for is right or wrong. I'm just saying, theres a pretty good reason to see what he has to say.

FWIW, my dad was an immigrant to America and worked hard and through much pain to get through the immigration process, and I finally just got my citizenship after 10+ years of growing up in the USA. The family has been through much suffering but I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for my dad being able to come to the States. I agree with Zuck's intentions even though he may or may not have different underlying motives.

In fact, we were all immigrants at one point, no reason to shut the door for other people now. Who gives a fuck if it drives down wages or puts more competition in the workforce. It's that versus a more open world for everyone. I'd choose the latter even if I have to take a paycut.

> You don't think he's learned a few lessons in the past 10 years that gives him some insight that's useful?

Insight into running a big organization? Sure. Insight into global politics? Not really.

> Who gives a fuck if it drives down wages or puts more competition in the workforce. It's that versus a more open world for everyone.

My dad was an immigrant too, and I got my citizenship about 8 years after moving here (at which point I had been living in the U.S. for most of my life). I don't give a damn about a "more open world for everyone." The purpose of a country is to maximize the prosperity of its citizens. Sometimes that's furthered by making things more open, and sometimes it isn't, but the key consideration should be the people who are already part of the body politic.

That's the only morally justifiable way of running a democracy. The people did not give up some of their freedom in order to institute government just so that government could sell out their interests in favor of the interests of other people. Those people have governments to watch out for their interests--they don't need ours to do so. Certainly, they don't want their governments watching out for our interests at the expense of theirs.

Can't a group of citizens can have interests beyond their personal prosperity?

Sure, and if that was the expressed view of the majority of the people, that's certainly the path government should follow.

The way I look at it is that some policies are intrinsically justifiable and some are not. If a policy is claimed to benefit the nation, it is intrinsically justifiable even if the people are not necessarily totally convinced of its utility (this is the prerogative of a government within a republican democratic system). If a policy is not claimed to benefit the nation, but to benefit other people, it must be justified on the basis of the fact that the people as a whole choose to be generous in that instance.

and for all his good fortune, he pays back society with an ultra-conservative agenda to drill in protected wilderness and drive down IT salaries via more H1B visas.

Once they climb that ladder, their first instinct is to throw it down.

Drilling isn't ultra-conservative. Most Americans are fine with drilling if it means better jobs/economy. Ultra implies only a very small minority would be in favor of this.

There are many other reasons than driving down IT salaries, to increasing H1Bs. And H1Bs aren't an ultra-conservative agenda: you'll find plenty of supporters on both sides of the US political spectrum.

Zuckerberg's luck ended when he was put in a situation where he could get the idea and build Facebook. That is, a talented coder and a student at an Ivy League university. That's already very lucky indeed, but it's a lot less lucky than a Powerball winner.

Literally thousands of students was in the right place at the right time - they had the exact same luck Zuckerberg did. But only Zuckerberg build Facebook.

But he still hit the lottery.

Since you want to go there, your above statement is true for pretty much every human being. That makes it rather meaningless in the context you've used it.

Well, except that we don't pay as much attention to every human being.

He was is the perfect storm of the right place at the right time on the right thing and played his hand beautifully. But he still hit the lottery.

Unfair, especially considering FB's growth over the decade. He made the place and the time and refused to get out of the storm for $1 Billion + several times. Oh, and he could've screwed up many times over the course of years. He didn't and over 1 BILLION people use /live on his site so give credit where credit is due.

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