Pretty clear to me after meeting a number of very successful people in NYC/SF that some people "just have it". Meaning, they can identify opportunities that have a high probability of success and execute on those opportunities. There are absolutely personality types/genetic backgrounds where stumbling into 100M based on thinking of an idea is a real thing.
Also, if someone went to a school like Stanford, its common for them to raise 5M in funding with nothing. From there, they can try for a few years with a decent chance at coming up with something, raising more money, pulling money off the table in round B, and then basically getting rich with no innovation at all. There are all these payoffs that exist from being in a certain class of prestige
Your first sentence is selection bias. Of course, successful people look like they "just have it". Once you have succeeded, convincing investors to fund another opportunity is far easier. The real question is how to succeed in the first place.
Having the right connections helps in getting funding. If you went to Stanford, your network would have many connections that are able to invest 5M. If you are raised in the slums, you are far less likely to have these connections, regardless of your genetic background or personality.
I've bootstrapped successfully three times, and have seen it from the other side.
Some people just don't get it. They have ideas that are so bad someone who "gets it" wouldn't even conceive of it as a possibility - the way that someone with Asperger's does unimaginably dumb things in social situations.
Unlike Asperger's, though, people that think this way aren't a tiny minority with a diagnosed disorder but ~70% of the population.
Yeah, it's really insane the number of bad ideas people try to make work.
All of the successful startups I've seen sounded like they could be successful. And every idea I've heard that sounded like it wouldn't be successful hasn't been.
Having a good business plan is no guarantee of success, but having a bad one will guarantee failure.
Any chance you could go a little more in-depth with what you mean? Why are the ideas so bad and what can someone who gets it recognize in them? Just curious.
Juicero for example. Most bad ideas stopped in the infancy stages, but some manages to find VC's who also don't get it and combined you get Juicero. There isn't something to get, its just really dumb ideas that aren't solving problems.
You need to be clear on outcomes though - as most people are talking about $10m+ exits for the founders. Bootstrapped to $100k ARR is nice but most people would still consider that a failure unless it takes little to no effort.
I started a business and realized very quickly that there are people who are good at sales and business development, and I’m not one of them.
The overall experience was still very worthwhile - what I learned about that side of things made me a better engineer, and I have a newfound respect for people who are good at the business side of things.
It would be easy for me to chalk it up to bad luck or not having the right privilege or whatever, but that just would be sour grapes.
As with everything in life, hard work can make up for lesser talent or bad luck, great talent can make up for a lack of effort, and being lucky is sometimes better than either.
Similar to software engineering its a skill that can be taught and honed. You don't get born as a natural salesman/woman but you learn the fundamentals, you practice and you get better.
Its funny how similar it is from the methodology perspective to programming despite it being about a completely different spectrum of skills.
> Pretty clear to me after meeting a number of very successful people in NYC/SF that some people "just have it". Meaning, they can identify opportunities that have a high probability of success and execute on those opportunities. There are absolutely personality types/genetic backgrounds where stumbling into 100M based on thinking of an idea is a real thing.
Yeah, I very much doubt it and I would bet a whole bunch of $$$ that there is no genetic basis, only a background/privilege correlation with some Gaussian noise. Do you have any papers to back up your claim? Or is this all anecdotes of "meeting people in NYC/SF"? We all meet people in NYC/SF but I see no such trend, I only see already rich people investing in things to get even richer.
Of course it does, the second paragraph in my original response states just that. This doesnt negate the fact that some people are exponentially better at business than others. Its the same in math, chess, basketball, football, writing, and every other human endeavor
> This doesnt negate the fact that some people are exponentially better at business than others. Its the same in math, chess, basketball, football, writing, and every other human endeavor
Citing chess directly contradicts your thesis about "innate talent".
In chess, the Polgar sisters are proof that training is the key and not genetics. The increasing existence of younger and younger chess grandmasters distributed around the world also shows that it's more about training than "innate talent".
Football and basketball do have a "innate talent" component--at the highest levels the competitors are genetic freaks.
However, any human endeavor not relying on pure physicality does not have "innate talent" limitations. "Talent" is almost always correlated to "early training" and "hard work".
I do wonder about the Polgar sisters case. By any measure their parents were also pretty exceptional individuals - just read the Wikipedia page - which is a huge confounding variable. Maybe “being laser focussed about raising a child genius” is a trait that manifests as “being laser focused at getting good at chess” when inherited!
"the Polgar sisters are proof that training is the key and not genetics"
Look, I don't have a dog in this fight but the idea that the Polgars "prove" that training is more important that genetics doesn't make sense. Evidence maybe, "proof" is just a silly assertion.
They were all born at different times and had different experiences and have different genes!
Here on HN folks are always going on about genes with confident assertions but the number of people that understand the difference between "heritability" and "genetics" seems to be very small.
"Football and basketball do have a "innate talent" component--at the highest levels the competitors are genetic freaks."
This is not a thing you have actual evidence for, and there are players at the highest levels of these sports that don't fit the mould of what you would expect it takes to succeed - it is too broad an assertion.
Polgar sisters clearly proves a genetic point if you notice their ancestry?
But I dont want to go individual examples, because individual geniuses possibly exist in every genetic pool. Let’s talk about averages where genetics do matter. On average which groups did/do well in intellectual pursuits. The trend is obvious but unfortunately taboo so we can’t have a reasonable conversation about this, even in this forum at times but if you study I think you’ll find some small sub groups overly represented in intellectual pursuits even when given extremely unfair environmental conditions like abject poverty or literal prosecution and you see this trend happening over and over again that it becomes clear to me that some gene pools are better suited to intellectual pursuits than other gene pools.
Also, if someone went to a school like Stanford, its common for them to raise 5M in funding with nothing. From there, they can try for a few years with a decent chance at coming up with something, raising more money, pulling money off the table in round B, and then basically getting rich with no innovation at all. There are all these payoffs that exist from being in a certain class of prestige