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Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

The second "Successful entrepreneurs move in packs" might be a product of the YC experience. It is a known fact that tech entrepreneurship is a lonely endeavour - not many people understand or care about what you're doing. Having a whole bunch of people with the same passion that are roughly at the same stage as you will inevitably tend to create a "wolfpack" trying to conquer the world.

But whether this is a trait of a successful entrepreneur is not so clear. I'm not saying it isn't so, just that the poster could be biased by the YC wolfpack experience. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, for instance, weren't wellconnected when they started out with Kazaa and in the early days of Skype. I have several friends that are lone wolf entrepreneurs, and don't have many close friends or business associates in the strartup world. And some of them are very succesful.

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It might also be a function of being in the Valley. Everyone seems to know each other here.

I think it certainly is. That's probably why there are startup hubs. My argument was more that connectedness to other entrepreneurs probably isn't one of the three most defining characters of succesful entrepreneurs.

I would counter-argue that it is a trait of successful entrepreneurs that they would be successful whether they did it alone or as part of a group.

While I don't agree, I'll admit that you may be right, but this is impossible to know.

But why make all the same mistakes? Why have to figure it all out on your own? Why reinvent every wheel that's already been built and can't get any more round? Why wouldn't you want a group of folks who will always give you the most critical feedback, but who will also sell you to potential customers, investors, and partners like no one else could? Trust me, your friends who haven't done this, can't help you nearly as much as your friends who are doing it right now. Sure, you can still be successful, and many have without organized seed programs around them, but why not take every advantage you can get?

There are myriad ways of measuring success, both entrepreneurially and otherwise. Your method is one approach, but there are others. Many of the entrepreneurs of former decades and centuries became successful not by asking their entrepreneur buddies for their opinions over beers, but by being persistent and shrewd.

Where you see comfort in others' advice, I see the dangers of falling into the same patterns as them. This is a widespread problem right now in several fields, not just entrepreneurship: there seems to be a cultural movement towards reading others' opinions and following others' advice in the name of not reinventing the wheel, versus solving the problem on your own.

The trouble with this is that there are lots of problems which can be solved through more than one unique approach, so in doing it the same way as everyone else, you're losing out on the opportunity to differentiate.

Interestingly enough, many of the folks I met remarked that they had 1. mentors who helped them get their first, second, nth company off the ground deal with problems, and just plain succeed, and 2. had sought out others doing the same thing. Oh, and these are folks who are the entrepreneurs of the last couple of decades. Guess what, they are the investors and mentors of today. Regarding the feedback of other startup folks, this isn't about going it your own way, far from it, it's about the things that are similar that are a waste of your most value resource - time, the contact you don't have and the intros that can be made, the things you haven't seen that can sink you, but aren't what make your business your business. Why waste time on that crap?

this is also a case of correlation does not imply causation. People who fall out of touch may have done so because things are not going well as opposed to being the cause of things not going so well.

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