[B0btheBuilder]

Zuckerberg's mom's a psychiatrist and his dad's a dentist. His dad taught him BASIC programming as a kid and then hired a software engineer as his tutor.

Gates' dad's a prominent lawyer and his mom was a prominent businesswoman on the board of directors on several different organizations. Not only did Gates learn programming as a kid, but Microsoft only got on IBM computers because his mom knew IBM executives.

When you come from privilege, it's much easier to have confidence that things will work out.

[znpy]

This, so much.

Not to undermine their success, but people tend to skip where their success come from, besides brightness. I mean, you can be as bright as possible, but of course if your parents are the first one investing on you (investing cash, I mean) then everything it's a lot easier.

This happens at various levels of course.

I recently had a conversation with an ex-colleague that had just left the company and was considering moving abroad. He said he had some money saved and I was shocked to hear how much he had saved. When I came back home, feeling quite miserable I must admit, I ran the numbers and understood the where the difference in his savings and mine came from: put simply, I had to move from another region of my nation to where I currently live and work, while he's just from here. The difference merely came from not being forced to pay a rent every month and on top of that, saving more money on others things he just didn't have to pay. There's nothing bad about that per se of course, I just felt a bit bitter because I understood that no matter how good or hard I work, that's a privilege gap I will probably never fill.

Privilege is something many people don't realise, and don't realise how big of an impact it makes.

[eigenvector]

I often read and post on a personal finance forum. I'm always surprised by how many posts go something like this:

"Just finished university, $100k to invest, what should I do?"

Wait, how does someone who just finished university have $100,000 in the bank? That's a milestone I proudly hit after several years in the workforce with a good job and living very frugally.

Of course, it's people whose parents paid 100% of their expenses (tuition and living) through university, so every penny they earned from internships, co-ops or scholarships went straight into the bank.

Now ask yourself how much easier it is to start a risky company when the first thing greeting you after finishing school is a 6-figure bank balance not $1000+/month of loan repayments.

[gammateam]

Just respect people who played the cards they were dealt

Who applied themselves

For every entrepreneur that had a shortcut, there are 1,000s of trust fund kids that vegetate

Its not about your struggle, keep applying yourself

The society benefits

[elmozyz]

Exactly. Privilege is just as much a hindrance as lack of opportunity.

How many families with the Zuckerberg and Gates level of privilege produced nothing significant

[toomanybeersies]

> When you come from privilege, it's much easier to have confidence that things will work out.

This is something that I discovered myself recently. A year ago I quit my job and moved to Australia with practically zero savings. It was a risky move, but I knew that at the end of the day if it all went wrong and I couldn't find a job and ran out of money, I'd be able to just fly back home and stay at my parents' house while I sorted my life out.

Not everybody gets this privilege. A lot of my friends are estranged from their parents, or their parents couldn't afford to put a roof over their head while they sort their life out.

I can afford to take risks, knowing that I have a safety net. I'm not going to end up homeless if a business idea fails or I get made redundant.

I had a decidedly middle class upbringing, but with that I had a lot of opportunities growing up that many people don't get. I have parents that have encouraged me and supported me in my endeavours and have generally been accepting of my (often poor) lifestyle choices.

[crispyambulance]

    > When you come from privilege, it's much easier to have confidence that things will work out.

I'm not convinced that it's possible to conclude much about success from examining the biographies of billionaires. They're such extreme outliers.

But yeah, the advantage of privilege is very real and you don't need Bill Gates to prove it.

[expertentipp]

We often forget that basically always brilliant successful kids have solid fundaments in form of their parents, affluent in the financial and legal domains. Even then they don't always succeed - remember that British kid who sold a recommendation engine to Yahoo?

The rags-to-riches in the industry doesn't exist, move along people.

[B0btheBuilder]

>remember that British kid who sold a recommendation engine to Yahoo?

Nick D'Aloisio? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_D'Aloisio)

I was confused when you mentioned him, then I realized you think he didn't succeed because he's not a billionaire or didn't create the next Facebook.

Young millionaire studying at Oxford? I would trade places with that dude in a heartbeat. From everything I'm reading on his Wikipedia page, he seems to be doing quite well.

[expertentipp]

As you are on British Facebook, that would be Friends Reunited. Not created by British peasants either.

[manmal]

Yes, because poor (or not-well-off) people have this enormous respect of money, and of people who have accumulated lots of it. They don’t want to waste this investor‘s time, and they are scared of asking customers for money.

Well-off people don’t have these problems. That random investor is just like their dad, plus or minus the Rolex, and they know their language („Have you been to Martha’s this year?“). Asking for money is not a problem either because they never experienced the process of spending money as painful - their worldview is that you have a certain budget to spend, and when it’s gone you either wait a bit or get some more.

[expertentipp]

It's about consequences as well. Someone not-affluent and not-well-connected will not be able to wash off the liability for burning down millions.

[hnuser355]

It’s so funny when you think about it. People are scouring the globe looking for places to put their money. They’ll hire armies of people to look for places to put their money. If I remember right Felix Dennis talked about this a lot in his book.

[zeristor]

Isn't it more a case that Yahoo! wasn't that discerning?

[drieddust]

Exactly where they would have been if they were born in Afghanistan. Probably maimed or dead.

I have asked this question to myself repeatedly and never arrived at satisfactory answer.

What pisses me off is the shear intellectual dishonesty with which these successes are reported.

Growing up my parents would always give references to such stories and make us feel how lazy we were for not succeeding like those kids.

Those who come from humble background can still make it big but only when all the stars align for them and they are too constrained to only do that one thing.

Rags to riches opportunities are risky bets and only those who can either afford the loss or don't have anything to lose and don't have any other opportunities apart from that one bet wins.

[walrus01]

Gates also went to one of the most expensive, rich kids' private schools in the Seattle area:

https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-private-high-scho...

[sizzle]

Besides Wikipedia, is there a repository or curated list somewhere that outlines the privileged upbringing of the most successful company founders?

I never knew this info about Gates or Zuckerberg, fascinating to say the least.

[GFischer]

They don't exactly advertise it. I remember Snapchat's founder (Evan Spiegel) was even weathier than Gates and Zuck (and that helped him resist buyout offers).

[sizzle]

Wow we need more transparency so we can see if old money families are churning out the most successful founders and the variables their parents invest in for their privileged upbringing.

[koonsolo]

You are 100% correct. So the lesson is: success is built over multiple generations.

I think you can do this in about 2-3 generations. So if you're not primed for success, you can work hard and kickstart the success of your kids.

Of course, lot's of tragedy occurs here when kids don't live up to parents expectations.

[friedman23]

Hundreds of millions have had similar privilege and still don't strike out and start there own businesses. There are many levels of success below Gates and Zuckerberg and most fail at even taking the risk.

[akhilcacharya]

Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, went to a normal magnet school like I did.

[derangedHorse]

Bezos was still fairly well off considering his parents were able to give him a 100k+ loan for Amazon. I'm not saying that it diminishes any of his accomplishments, just that I think it's pretty pointless to try and normalize privilege since everyone has had some "privilege" in their life dependent on perspective.

[zorga]

> I'm not saying that it diminishes any of his accomplishments

It does, very few parents can afford to give a 100k loan, that's a massive leg up most have no access to.

[SomewhatLikely]

That could come off a little tone deaf since many school districts likely can't afford magnet schools.

[mclehman]

That's kind of how it landed here.

My old school district has one middle school and one high school, and pushed out the one of the best teachers I've ever had. That said, an organic chemistry class was offered, thanks entirely to the efforts of another great teacher.

I never had any real choices in my grades 6-12 education so, to me, being in a position to choose a school with a curriculum catering to one's interests and talents does seem to be a privilege many people take for granted.

[akhilcacharya]

Oh no doubt. My magnet school had a graduating class of 40 people. But Bezos didn't go to Exeter.

[gaius]

When you come from privilege, it's much easier to have confidence that things will work out.

It’s not just that, it’s that confidence is taught to certain classes. If you know anyone who went to “public” (i.e. private) school they all seem to have this relaxed, easygoing charm. Do they consistently make better decisions than anyone else? No, they skip straight to giving the appearance of someone who does, and it’s amazing how effective it is.

[thoughtexplorer]

Make no mistake, anyone born into an advanced country is privileged. We are very privileged and lucky compared to someone born in the Congo.

Beyond that it seems rather meaningless to attribute success to privilege over a multitude of other factors. It helps, but it's not the main component. Indeed those with the most privilege tend not to do so well. Consider rich kids who turn into generally unsuccessful adults. Clogs to clogs in 3 generations. The opposite of success.

Meanwhile you have people like JayZ who started among the least privileged (relative to the country) becoming one of the most privileged.

As for Gates, he had the drive and interest to spend his time learning how to program and explore business while he was a kid. While most of his peers were likely using that time to watch TV or party. That's an essential difference and no amount of privilege is going to bridge that.

[zorga]

> Make no mistake, anyone born into an advanced country is privileged.

Privilege is not binary, being born into a rich family gives you a massive amount of privilege that being born into the lower class doesn't regardless of how we compare with other countries. So your point here, is rather missing the point entirely.

[Jach]

Privilege is a useless (for non political purposes) lens to view people through, so don't even grant the idea of privilege by birth country.

[WaddyJones]

>As for Gates, he had the drive and interest to spend his time learning how to program and explore business while he was a kid. While most of his peers were likely using that time to watch TV or party. That's an essential difference and no amount of privilege is going to bridge that.

Dude his drive and interest was solely determined by his physical appearance aka the fact that he considered himself ugly. If gates could choose he would have been a good looking tv watching party chad. But he was an uggo so he statusmaxxed instead.