All it takes is for one to work out
alearningaday.blog804 points by herbertl 3 days ago
804 points by herbertl 3 days ago
This is why having a safety net and resources to try again is so powerful. Given enough chances you will make it, big. That means the #1 factor in success is the number of chances you get to fail and try again, not necessarily how inherently good you are. I try to remind myself of this often. I have been given so many chances, and I took them.
This always sounded intuitively correct to me, but looking back over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net. They just went all in on their goals when they were young and had many years ahead of them to start over if it all went wrong.
Contrast this with some of the people I grew up who came from wealthy families: A lot of their parents pushed them toward entrepreneurship and funded their ventures, but to date I can only think of one business from this cluster of friends that went anywhere. When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation.
I don’t know exactly what to make of this, other than to remind myself to keep pushing through the difficult times for things I really want even when I could fall back to an easy path and give up.
Who are you thinking of? Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk all came from wealthy families. They all had the safety net of their family wealth if their business didn’t work out. Even someone who had parents to pay their student loans is relatively privileged, not everyone starts their 20’s debt-free and able to take financial risks.
Bezos’ mom had him at 17, his biological father owned a bike shop, and his mother remarried when Bezos was 4 to a Cuban immigrant who came to the country at 16 and ended up working as a petroleum engineer.
They wound up middle class after all that, but I certainly wouldn’t say Bezos came from a “wealthy family”.
Bezos' parents lent him $250k to start Amazon. The point is that by the time Bezos started Amazon they were wealthy and could provide him this safety net. Not many middle class families would be able to loan their kid that much money.
That $250k was their life’s savings. They made a huge bet on their son.
His mom took night classes while raising him so she could finish her education while working to support a family.
okay but $250k is still $250k right? Most people in the world, for most parts of the world, don't see that kind of money in an entire lifetime of work. Most people think privilege means a trust fund, but a $250k loan of US dollars (life-savings or not) is also a privilege that most people don't have.
i think in this thread the goalposts were slowly moved. people were initially talking about success being predicted by having the excess necessary to comfortably take many shots on goal. it seems like we've granted that this $250k shot was a one-time thing.
it is true but irrelevant to the original topic that this is more money than the global poor ever see, and that this is more money that most people get to have. i don't think anyone was arguing that this represents zero privilege
Do you have a source for that being their life savings?
Most of your points have nothing to do with their wealth. Why would it suggest they’re poor if his mom had him at 17 and was taking night classes while raising him? She wasn’t employed, that just sounds like she herself was still able to take risks beyond her means probably because her father was wealthy.
Do you have a source for that not being their life savings? It sounds like you're just making assumptions and guesses as well; if you're going to assert Bezos came from wealth in the first place, you have to back that up. Perusing the "early life" section of Bezos' Wikipedia page doesn't suggest to me that he came from money, at least. But I don't see anyone on either side of the argument presenting anything beyond that.
> Do you have a source for that not being their life savings?
Do you have a source for the $250 not being from the invisible pink unicorn?
Because my understanding it was from the invisible pink unicorn
> Do you have a source for that not being their life savings?
I mean there are many sources that talk about the $300k he received from his family to start Amazon, it's a famous story. None of those sources mention that it was his family's life savings. I don't really know how to provide a source that says it wasn't his family's life savings, but I also can't provide a source that says he wasn't an alien from Zeta Reticula. This is generally the problem with proving a negative and why the onus is usually on the person making a positive assertion.
> if you're going to assert Bezos came from wealth in the first place, you have to back that up.
I did, I'm saying that a family that can give their son $300k to start a business in 1993 is wealthy. That would be about $674k today.
isn't this an argument against the original post: that the more dice rolls the greater likelihood of success?
Yep, my father, with no business training or college was funded by my grandfather and was in business for years, decades. He ultimately failed without any savings and died in poverty. Being a small business owner was the only job he ever had.
My grandfather was similar--he was the first one to leave the farm life and tried several different careers and businesses. He worked for a railroad, was a realtor, owned a lumber yard, and lastly owned a delicatessen. The lumber yard nearly destroyed the entire family because he would sell on credit and then contractors failed to pay up on time. It was a huge disaster and the the thing is, this was way before the Home Depot national type chains or the "84 Lumber" regional type chains and if he had had any business acumen at all, he could have been the franchise. People don't know what they don't know. Anyways, my dad worked for my grandfather for free for several years and screwed up his life quite a bit doing so in order to "save the family" and I think my dad has told me this damn story every single time I have called him on the telephone for at least the past 30 years. His complex over the whole situation must be enormous!
This is why I never started a business myself. I figured it was a family curse to fail at business.
Bezo’s maternal grandfather worked for the Department of Energy and owned a ranch in Texas. They were wealthy enough to have $300k to give to Jeff in 1993.
Those people you mention may be examples of the exception, not the rule. Certainly many new businesses work out when they are founded by someone from a wealthy family; it would be strange if that was never the case.
But maybe it's more common that successful businesses are started by founders coming from more modest means. Page & Brin, and Jobs & Wozniak come to mind (none came from poor families, but they weren't rich either). I'm sure there are many other examples, and those are just the famous ones; there are many successful companies started by people we've never heard of.
You really need to be connected and have resources to succeed or the machinery will eat you alive.
Yeah they aren't like, outlier wealthy though. They all had lawyer/doctor/banker parents.
If having your student loans paid off for you is enough, then there are 10s of millions of people in their shoes. Why did they not succeed if that is what it takes?
I didn’t say they need to be outlier wealthy, I’m disagreeing with the assertion that it just takes focus and grit to be successful. I agree with the initial comment that it has more to do with how many chances you get to take, and being able to take chances throughout your 20’s is a relatively rare and privileged opportunity. Most people need to find gainful employment immediately after college, they can’t take 5-10 years making no money on long shot bets.
Where are you getting the figure that there are 10’s of millions of college grads in their 20’s with no debt? There are only 2 million undergraduate grads in the US every year. I think you’re probably off by a couple orders of magnitude.
>> Why did they not succeed if that is what it takes?
short answer: it's might be necessary but not sufficient.
Alex Honnold, the rock climber with some pretty spectacular solo / speed ascents was asked why no-one else has free soloed El Cap, replied "it's hard." he spent a lot of time (years) building up to it and finishing other routes, and no one else has taken these first steps yet. He goes on that they may have the talent or disposition, but not the motivation or an experience that pushes them in another direction. His perspective (similar to general outlier success) is others will do it but it takes a bunch of things all coming together, including luck.
Contacts.
Bill Gates mother worked with IBM CEO. Without her maybe IBM would choose other company than Microsoft.
> Who are you thinking of?
It’s pretty clear that @Aurornis is talking about people they know personally. They literally mention that they’re talking about people they grew up with.
Whereas you are talking about a completely different group of people: Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk are the survivorship bias set.
You’re talking at cross purposes with the person you’re responding to.
Why would anyone base their debate on "people they know"?!
What kind of conversation is worth having with someone who doesn't understand observation bias and has a main character complex?
These are outliers.
Think of motivation. Most people who live financially comfortable lives will want little more in the way of wealth when balanced against risk and effort. They also have something to lose. Their circumstances shift the incentives.
Now think of the temperaments of people who chase wealth. If they come from money, then the comfort they live in is not going to satisfy them. If they come from financially less than stellar backgrounds, they may be more likely to crave that kind of attainment; money is a kind of unfamiliar blank canvas onto which they can project all sorts of fantastic expectations (most of which are bogus). And unlike the better off, they have less to lose. Add to all this an inferiority complex that can compel compensation behavior. They may have a tougher start financially, but psychologically, they are more compelled by their circumstances than their wealthier counterparts.
So we should avoid being reductive.
And we should stop reducing “success” to money.
I don't think anyone in this particular thread was necessarily reducing or equating success to money, they were merely pointing out examples in which certain folks attained financial success. The parent-most comment was referring to the importance of a safety net in order to get more chances (whether it's risking it to become a business owner, or going back to school, or whatever your definition of success is).
And it's true. If you have a good financial safety net then you can take more chances and increase the odds that your next risk will be the one that works out.
Of course, the most easily quantifiable definition of success is usually financial, and on and off HN, it's probably the most common definition of success.
For me myself, I'm grateful to be doing well financially. I grew up in an upper middle class family. But I still do want to grow my wealth. I am not going to take wild risks to do so, but I'll work hard and use my current wealth wisely to grow it. What will more wealth get me? Financial security, freedom. It'll give my wife and me the freedom to choose if we want to stay at home with the kids. It'll let us easily fund their college, or whatever education or path they decide to pursue. The goal isn't being a billionaire. It's freedom and security.
I think that's success for a lot of people, and it usually manifests itself as just having more money because that's the first step. But it's not always the end goal.
You can choose to think that op meant only the most insanely rich billionaires. I thought they meant their actual experiences with peers. Cut out the outliers and be realistic and I think it’s easier to understand the point without the extremism. The range of what people consider success is quite large.
Yes, it's a bit forced trying to turn someone's anecdotes that spur some food for thought into some kind of a categoric stance.
They asked the parent who they were thinking of, a more recent example of an "up and coming" billionaire would be Palmer Luckey, whose life experience seems to be at least consistent with his stance against optionality.
Edit: Ref
"A lot of my peers in the tech industry do not share this philosophy … They’re always pursuing everything with optionality. ’Oh, I need to be able to raise money from anybody. I need to be able to sell my business in any way. I need to have liquidity in any way. I need to make sure that I’m not closing myself off to future romantic partners. I need to make sure I’ve got my options open. I need to make sure that I’m not going to buy a house and settle down in one place and lock myself down. Oh, having children. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not ready to commit to that path."
I chose those examples because they’re well known and public. I asked for counter examples and no one seems to be able to share any.
I posted some as a reply to one of your other posts.
Why do we need well-known, public examples? I think it would be absurd to assert that there are very few successful founders that don't come from wealthy families. (Just as it would be absurd to suggest there are few that do come from wealthy families.)
Musk came to Canada with a few hundred dollars to his name. Worked on farms. Never got a loan from his dad, afaik.
It’s probably true that he could have somehow gone back to South Africa as a “safety net” if you will, but I believe that would’ve been the last thing he would have wanted.
If you’re really poor, you can’t take a plane to another country and start a new life, sure. But out of those people who could, if they scraped their resources together, how many do?
This isn’t to blame anyone. I would suppose that the vast majority of people would not want to be Elon Musk. Would not want that kind of life. But for the claim that he is what he is because it was served to him on a silver platter by his family just isn’t supported by any facts.
What was Musk families net worth?
I hear this conspiracy theory that he's was super rich. But owning a mine could mean anything from a basically bankrupt speculator to the De Beers. There's claims he gave Musk $28k ... that's not evena decent college fund.
From his dad's Wikipedia page:
>His lucrative engineering business took on "large projects such as office buildings, retail complexes, residential subdivisions, and an air force base." He also owned an auto parts store, at least half a share in an emerald mine, and even "one of the biggest houses in Pretoria."[12] His ex-wife Maye's book recalls that at the time of their divorce in 1979, he owned two homes, a yacht, a plane, five luxury cars, and a truck.[13]
Elon was 8 in 1979.
They had this amount of money
> As a result of this, the teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father said: “We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,” adding that one person would have to hold the money in place with another closing the door. “And then there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.” [1]
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/space/elon-musk-made-money-ric...
The pocket emerald story that comes before that "we were very wealthy" line is even more telling. It's missing from that Independent article, but that article's based on this Business Insider interview: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-dad-tells-bi-abou...
> Elon, by his father’s recollection then probably 16 years old, and his brother Kimbal, decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York – one of the world's most famous jewelers – as his father lay sleeping. "They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, ‘Do you want to buy some emeralds?’" Errol recalled in an interview with Business Insider South Africa. "And they sold two emeralds, one was for $800 and I think the other one was for $1,200."
> A few days later the family returned to the store to find that Tiffany was selling the $800 emerald, now set in a ring, for $24,000 -- a markup of 30 times the price Elon had received for the gem.
> Errol has used the story as on object lesson in how retail works ever since. He was surprised but not concerned by the incident, Errol says, because money was plentiful.
> “We were very wealthy,” says Errol. “We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.”
So, selling-emeralds-to-Tiffany's-at-16 rich.
So his dad was so poor he kept his money in a safe ...
You can fit maybe 2 million in a safe. Maybe less if it's poorly packed, small denominations, other items in storage (id, etc). A safe full of money is like having an investment property, it's not really a sign of unreal wealth.
It's like some 20 year old on TikTok flexing a Rolex with aftermarket "diamonds" - it isn't dirt poor but it's not what you'd exactly call generational wealth. You don't even hear Trump bragging about having a ton of cash - even the crassest most trashy rich person wouldn't brag about a safe full of cash.
Half the posters here probably have parents with more assets.
Just look at how insanely biased people are here. Elon once allegedly stole $2k worth of emeralds from his dad, and they're gushing over what fabulous wealth that is.
$2k is a phone or a laptop. Elon was so madly rich he stole something as valuable as a laptop from his dad, and this is somehow evidence that he's basically a de Beers?
I can't tell if this is rage bait or not.
What do you disagree with?
1. A safe would hold less than $2M.
2. Someone bragging about less than $2 million in assets is not unbelievably rich.
3. People talk about Musk in a way that suggests his parents were extremely rich.
> What do you disagree with?
His parents are telling you they were very wealthy and you somehow managed to come to the conclusion that Elon grew up poor.
I guarantee you the median American isn't so wealthy their safes are overflowing with cash.
Over $2 million in assets about the time Musk was matriculating would have put in the top 0.1%, e.g. 1 in 1000. That would be fairly rich to me
That seems pretty silly. Why keep your wealth as cash in a safe?
(And why not use a fraction of the money to buy a second safe, if you really have to keep it in a safe at home.)
I know nothing about this specific situation, so I'm not speak to that. I am speaking to "why keep your wealth as cash in a safe?"
I'm old enough that grandparents lived through the great depression. I know they kept wealth in a safe. A lot of their kids did as well. The grandparents had their gold money taken away, or their cash disappeared in banks. A lot of their kids followed along.
Being gen X, Elon has parents/grandparents that lived through the great depression and world war. That along with any other local factors makes keeping wealth in a safe not that unusual.
To keep it away from the tax man.
Maybe. But wouldn't you rather hire a good accountant and lawyer instead of bothering with cash at home?
A good accountant or lawyer would tell you to pay the taxes you can't avoid.