I think we see what we're predisposed to see in these things. When I read the essay, what stood out to me was how long he got by with almost no money. Living on $7 a day etc.
If there's privilege here (and if we're using that word in something other than a Twitter putdown sense), it seems to me more more intellectual than financial. pg has clearly always been single-minded about doing what he wanted to do / was interested in, and stubborn as hell about not doing what he didn't want to do. That mindset may be part nature and part nurture, but at least his upbringing didn't damage it, as many other people's would have.
To me the key detail is not that pg nagged his father into buying a TRS-80, not that he learned to program with it, but that his father used one of pg's own programs to write an entire book. That's a hell of a success for a kid, and it says something significant about their relationship. Many of us had a similar path to the first two of those steps, but that third step branches somewhere different—perhaps life-changingly different.
I think it’s so much more difficult these days to get significant success (jobs going away to AI, more competition, many of the low hanging discoveries and technologies being completed - I would love to make billions writing a chat app or simple CRUD database like Facebook!) that most of us are predisposed to focus on the luck part of things and not the hard work element.
I agree with you - people are missing the fact that the author was able to live on a very meagre salary for years.
> I would love to make billions writing a chat app
In 1998 I wrote an IRC client for Linux/Gtk+. Really the first graphical app that wasn't Tcl/Tk or Motif based. Even back then people were saying "yet another IRC client", due to the fact that there were dozens of them around. I was often embarrassed to talk about my work because it just felt a bit lame and overdone. But in reality, I wasn't thinking big enough.
Since then: Twitter, WhatsApp, and Slack all came along and made billions. And also Line, WeChat, Snapchat, and more.
This all came after AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and others died off.
Slack was not even 10 years ago. I'm still baffled at how Slack happened. Any one of us could have created it, but did not. What you should realize is that the marketplace is fluid and changes based on technology, incumbents losing their mojo (see AMD vs Intel right now), and various other factors.
People often talk about first-mover advantage, but I've never seen the relevance. Facebook came after MySpace, Friendster, and others. MySpace was vastly more open, and yet Facebook, with their restricted profiles and limited availability eclipsed MySpace. Slack came into an environment with Skype and Hipchat. Microsoft and Atlassian both had deep pockets and first-mover advantage and couldn't win. Google was up against Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, and even offered itself up for sale to AltaVista for $1 million. But in the end they had the better tech and the better user experience.
Thanks for your insight. What do you think is the secret sauce for the success of these companies?
Is it marketing and grabbing mindshare? I hear a lot these days that people discount programming aspects or ideas for a product - they say rather it’s the ecosystem to take an idea and push it to the masses.
Is there a common trend in these examples or do they all have their unique particulars (eg Facebook being borne out of Harvard social network)?
Even when facebook came out there plenty of other apps like it. Same with Instagram and whatsapp. Same with the myriad delivery companies. The success comes from users rather than a revolutionary idea
You can have a revolutionary idea without it being a new kind of product. For example Facebook did many things very differently than its competitors.
Firstly it didn't show when you looked at others profiles, all previous networks did that and it makes people think twice before interacting with it.
Secondly it solved real names, people actually used their real names at Facebook which made it easy to find real friends and old friends on it.
Thirdly it only had an upvote button and no downvote making posting content at worst ignored instead of having to be scared of downvotes.
These three taken together greatly increased growth and user engagement. Without them Facebook would never have became a company capable of rivalling Google.
Google similarly just made a much better search engine than the competition. The revolutionary idea wasn't "Lets make a search engine", but "With this algorithm we can make the best search engine in the world, and that is worth a lot!".
Agreed. An empowering upbringing is a factor with a huge weight. Upbringing that actively attacks the learned helplessness and never allows it to even show itself is what makes people confident and be able to utilize a good luck.
If there's privilege here (and if we're using that word in something other than a Twitter putdown sense), it seems to me more more intellectual than financial. pg has clearly always been single-minded about doing what he wanted to do / was interested in, and stubborn as hell about not doing what he didn't want to do. That mindset may be part nature and part nurture, but at least his upbringing didn't damage it, as many other people's would have.
To me the key detail is not that pg nagged his father into buying a TRS-80, not that he learned to program with it, but that his father used one of pg's own programs to write an entire book. That's a hell of a success for a kid, and it says something significant about their relationship. Many of us had a similar path to the first two of those steps, but that third step branches somewhere different—perhaps life-changingly different.
Edit: btw, on the matter of luck, I always remember https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621768.