This is a well-written essay even if it's a bit long and somewhat navel-gazing (it is, after all, written for pg himself). However, I was continuously struck by just how ridiculously privileged and serendipitous pg's early life was to the point where I just can't even relate to it.
He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school because he felt like it, and only stumbled into an actual job because he was basically broke. Then he magically found an incredibly affordable NYC apartment and finally was in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the dot com boom and again lucked his way into leaving at the right time, mostly because he was burned out.
Don't get me wrong, pg obviously worked hard on both Viaweb and Ycom, and self-taught a lot of the startup lessons that are now common knowledge. But if I wrote this story as fiction with pg as the main character, people would laugh at the absurdity of it. For people who don't think luck is one of the biggest factors of success, just read this essay.
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.
"Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner, and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through the newspaper determined to find certain job advertisements and, as a result, miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there, rather than just what they are looking for."
This is a chicken or the egg problem. Is the type of a person who has the intellectual capacity to invent the SaaS model and angel investing at scale just purely lucky to have the right timing for his inventions, or would that same person have invented something else in case that their life was time-shifted by a few years or decades or even centuries? People often say that once you're lucky, twice you're good.
If you wrote the story as fiction, most non-tech readers would find it boring. Somebody who is really interested in tech, driven and works all day, every day.
For the tech-savvy readers there's a lot of stuff pg did that is not directly related to his material success, but oh so cool.
You don't write a book on Lisp because you want to get rich. You write it because you just do it for its own sake. And then he got rich immediately after publishing it.
What a cool move. For the nerds who can read the signals.
While it's true about the schools, I don't agree with you on your other points. It seems like PG is cognizant of change around and within him.
It wasn't by pure luck that he started Ycom, and it wasn't pure luck he started Viaweb. With viaweb he had a first mover advantage sure, but had already noticed tech and programming were interesting and changing the world. Ycom, as he said, angel investors didn't exist before Ycom. He almost created the term. Hardly luck.
It's certainly true the moving around schools, the cheap apartments etc is just not possible today.
Yeah this is what struck me as well. I and a number of my compatriots in high school had the ability to go to very prestigious institutions, but only a couple of us did - largely those from the worst off families economically as they were given full scholarships. None completed their degrees there however. The life of someone that privileged is pretty hard to relate to indeed, and that coming from someone who considers himself rather privileged in the first place.
Who in the world doesn't think luck isn't the biggest factor in success? There are 100 PGs that were on the same path but got hit by a car, or early cancer, or killed in war, et cetera.
Just because he was born on mile 10 when others born on the same day in a poorer part of the world were born at mile 1, doesn't mean that making it to mile 1,000,000 isn't impressive.
If you think life is all about luck, and that where you are born is where you will die, and the decisions you make along the way are irrelevant, then that will probably be your fate.
I read an essay where sure, someone won the ovarian lottery (like 800K people do every year by definition), but he then goes on to higher and higher wrungs, and frequently throughout the essay mentions people that helped him out to hit each next rung. Then once he was successful went on to help thousands of people directly, and many orders of magnitude times that indirectly.
Lots of people are born a lot "luckier" then PG and then do nothing for others, or even worse try and pull the ladder up from those behind them.
I mostly agree, but it's unlikely he paid tuition for grad school; most PhD programs come with a tuition waver and a (small) stipend, in exchange for research/teaching.
Luck may be one of the biggest factors of success but it’s one outside of our control. So no need to pocket watch other people’s luckyness;)
I say this as somebody who always complains of being unlucky. What I’ve noticed is that luck plays a role, but you have to have the right mindset to take advantage of the opportunity. This is a very difficult thing to do and not a given by any means. Most people probably say they are unlucky but actually they were not good enough.
> For people who don't think luck is one of the biggest factors of success, just read this essay.
Luck has always been the biggest factor of success in "superstar", high-visibility, bubble-powered fields. You don't hear about all the people who weren't similarly lucky.
Yep. People have gotten the gray comment treatment in the past here on HN for expressing views like yours.
I can't help but think that PG's life story draws to it a clique of people who are convinced there's a clear-cut recipe to success and that reading PG's articles will give them that recipe.
Now let's be clear: there is such a thing as "have enough brains to utilize opportunity when it lands on your shoulder". There absolutely is! And people have been failing at life for missing them. So I am not disputing THAT part of PG's skill-set. He obviously made a very good use of his luck.
Some people have pointed at Eminem's success story as a better example. But I still disagree; Eminem was (likely still is) a genius at what he does but his success also came from influential people being present at a very niche and unknown event in a shady part of the town.
So, again, luck. His iconic song "Lose Yourself" is IMO a good illustration of the concept.
I think motivational stories about success will be much better if the successful people:
1. Make it crystal clear what background they came from;
2. Analyze how they made use of the plentiful opportunity that was thrown their way;
3. Coach people on how to maximally utilize an opportunity when it comes to you.
Especially #3 is something that I think our hustle culture could use much more material on.
He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school because he felt like it, and only stumbled into an actual job because he was basically broke. Then he magically found an incredibly affordable NYC apartment and finally was in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the dot com boom and again lucked his way into leaving at the right time, mostly because he was burned out.
Don't get me wrong, pg obviously worked hard on both Viaweb and Ycom, and self-taught a lot of the startup lessons that are now common knowledge. But if I wrote this story as fiction with pg as the main character, people would laugh at the absurdity of it. For people who don't think luck is one of the biggest factors of success, just read this essay.