Elon Musk's first wife on what it takes to become a billionaire
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Zip2 would've been a complete bust in 2003, and he wouldn't have had the funds to move on to his subsequent ventures. The guy obviously has a lot of great ides, but lots of people have great ideas. Without the financial backing... good luck.
I think that acknowledges that luck is also a prerequisite.
Of a hundred million babies born this year, they do NOT all have the same chance of becoming a billionaire. That's luck.
Self made billionaires are opportunists. They are smart. They are shrewd. They look at the big picture. For every reason they're told they can't do something, they find a solution, they don't see obstacles as deal breakers, they're just speed bumps, irritations that need to be resolved/removed, hoops to be jumped through to get where they're going. They look for the next possibility and insert themselves where they need to in order to leverage what they have to get where they need to go.
So you see it doesn't have as much to do with chance as you might think. What was chance was the bubble occurring. But Elon making use of that opportunity when it presented itself was anything but chance, that was all Elon. He spied an opportunity and rode it until he was shrewd enough to get off the elevator... which is what he's still doing. Finding opportunity and leveraging it to make his next billion dollars.
This is an especially disingenuous characterization, considering he jumped through the hoops to immigrate to the US and go to California, which means he observed and realized that CA is where he should be and worked towards getting there (he's been very vocal about him coming to North America being one of the most important decisions he made and that he quite planned for it). He didn't happen to wake up one day in CA.
Yes, many people are luckier and they happen to be born in Silicon Valley to affluent parents, but the fact that most (almost all) of them have not achieved what Elon has achieved hints at a the use of a stretched definition of the word "luck."
you can say this about a lot of people... pg even, but paypal went public in 2002. i would argue he did the opposite, elon musk remarkably sold a company in the wake of the dot com crash.
but it's like they say, once you're lucky, twice you're good. And Elon Musk is damn good.
Forgive me if that seems a bit snarky but her point is not "you want it" but "deeply thinking about the problem." And when you do that, and you discover that the solution you have to a problem seems to be wildly over valued with respect to your understanding of it, you sell out because you know that when the market stops being irrational that value will evaporate.
You could do like Pincus, found a gaming company and make sure you can pull out $200M on your own before the rest of the world catches up. Or Mason w/ Groupon. There is a lot more work than lottery in there.
This is absolutely true. People who can competently live in two different "modes" definitely have an advantage over those who are residents of just one. Steve Jobs, for instance, brought together engineering and design/aesthetics in a way that got Apple noticed and gave it massive competitive advantage over their competitors, who were perceived as boring, ugly and unoriginal. He wasn't a master engineer like Wozniak, and he wasn't a master designer like, say, Ive, but he had a very good understanding and appreciation for both and that's what made him special.
As a side note, there's something about Ms. Musk's writing that really appeals to me. It's clear, concise, and creative.
You mean, Dieter Rams, of course. Ive, for all his talents, is a rehash of a master. If anything Ive is a great example of a multifaceted non-master who knew how to handle two worlds: the no-holds-barred big business world and the artsy design and marketing world. I really see him as a Jobs-like character. Jobs had Woz. Ive had Rams, indirectly of course.
I would hope so; She's a novelist.
Spend time with people. Listen to what they say in unguarded moments, like moments of frustration, fatigue, or high emotion. Accumulate data. If you hear someone who wishes in frustration that they could think of the right gimmick so they can get their payout, then remember that as data about how they really see the work of doing a startup.
In particular, pay attention to what people pay attention to and how they filter information. Do they act to insulate themselves from unusual information, or do they seek out data that contradicts their own mental model? How well can they avoid "grinding an axe" in the way they seek information? Are they giving a genuine effort at analyzing things from first principles, and do they even know what that entails in the first place?
Now here's my self-serving advice: Get the help of someone who is insightful and intelligent, but whom others are prone to underestimate. Such people have a superpower: A social/tactical camouflage that puts them in a good position to detect lip-service to the values embodied in the paragraphs above.
EDIT: Also, the overarching first principle of startups will be of less direct help when dealing with every-day minutiae. Often, these are your problems on the way to solving the customer's problem. However, applying the overarching principle to such schlepping may also help you find an even better problem to solve.
> They are unlikely to be reading stuff like this. (This is not to slam or criticize people who do; I love to read this stuff myself.) They are more likely to go straight to a book: perhaps a biography of Alexander the Great or Catherine the Great* or someone else they consider Great. Surfing the 'Net is a deadly timesuck, and given what they know their time is worth -- even back in the day when technically it was not worth that -- they can't afford it.
This paragraph kind of reverberate with me. I like checking HN. It's interesting and while most of the times you don't learn about X, at least you know what it's out there. And I tell myself I'm "working" keeping myself updated. And then spread thin across different subjects. Because, hey! these days you have to know everything. Even more if you want to build a business and have to wear all the hats.
OTOH the words of Richard Hamming on "keeping an open door" come to mind.
Timebox and prioritize seems to be the best solution.
This is a "problem in the world" in the same way that sex out of wedlock is a "problem." It's just one of the many facets of human nature. Historically, institutions and policies that take human nature into account fare better than those railing against it. The United States is one of the biggest examples.
This is one of those statements that should go up on a billboard that the more idealistic members of HN are forced to read frequently.
"Introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before."
She has many good points though, especially about the web (waste of time...) and such articles not being what successful people tend to be reading...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2013/09/18/how-self-...
I'm aware this doesn't contradict what you said. Just wanted to give more detail.
"After technology, real estate produced the next largest group of self-made Forbes 400 members."
Yeah I get that real estate is a good business to amass large scales of wealth. From what I've studied about money laundering, real estate is the most advantageous method for cleaning up dirty money...I'm not accusing all of the self-made real estate moguls of money laundering, but I'd be suspicious that not all of them saved up their tips from working minimum wage jobs to get their start.
And the best part of real estate like every other investment is. Most people don't realize how good it is until more than half their life is spent. At that point, the entry price of that arena is generally quite high and given all the family responsibilities and other expenses(Health, education and your own retirement) the level is prohibitive enough for most people to not even try.
This means people who make these investments early on in their lives(in their 20's) are best positioned to reap rewards from real estate investments.
When you look at the end millions, the initial few hundred thousand seem inconsequential, but it's a lot easier to get there if you can invest $100k/yr rather than from $5k/yr. (Saving $5k/yr while earning minimum wage is difficult. Saving $100k/yr. while earning $150k/yr., not so much--assuming all these earnings are after taxes.)
E.g. being raised in an American [upper] middle class family is already considered as being quite a rich by world standards.
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would probably be languishing in obscurity if Paypal had not been sold off right at the edge of the dotcom bubble and given them a financial base to propel their future.
It is being at the right place, at the right time, with the right skill, finding the right investors/employees, partners and much more. When all of that aligns, you get a billionaire. It is only slightly less lucky than playing lottery.
PS: This does not apply to being a millionaire. You can be a millionaire by working hard, taking an upper middle class job and investing prudently.
Luck is the final ingredient, secret sauce of sorts that makes a hardworking person rich. A person isn't successful just out of hard work, its because they are lucky too.
And besides that you won't be rich if you are too nice, honest and sincere.
My point was you need to do all the hard work. But luck play a huge role after that or at that stage.
Either way you can still get rich if you are lucky. In fact that is what luck is about. Its an unfair advantage.
Maybe there are no insights. Maybe it is all a sum of the generic things she spoke of, and pure luck of having successful consecutive ventures.
But to put it simply, it's not that great of a Quora answer.
... we are all just single, elementary experiments within a gigantic, global monte carlo simulation :)
All you can hope for is that your random configuration plays well - b/c you will never know for sure - it's the supervising virtual and hypthetical power evaluating your performance after termination as a statistic.
Then again - don't strive for material satisfaction and you will be a billionaire immediately - and your currency is happiness.
Who ever thought Minecraft would make notch a billionaire? I didn't.
Edit: That is not to say you can't learn anything and it's futile to think about these questions, just don't expect a treasure map to fall out of these thought experiments :)
http://www.businessinsider.sg/book-recommendations-from-char...