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by coldtea 2025 days ago
I'd say the combo of "work ethic, risk tolerance, and perseverance against ridiculous odds" involved in Tesla/Apple/etc, is orders of magnitude more commonly found than actual Tesla/Apple/etc level success...
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I'd say the combo of "work ethic, risk tolerance, and perseverance against ridiculous odds" involved in Tesla/Apple/etc, is orders of magnitude more commonly found than actual Tesla/Apple/etc level success...

Agreed. For every tech millionaire there are a thousand guys who are just as smart and worked just as hard and it didn’t work out for whatever reason. Maybe their timing was off by a mere 6 months for example. There’s a lot of survivorship bias in what is in large part a lottery.

> Maybe their timing was off by a mere 6 months for example.

First job I had (1995) was "Classified Ads on the Internet" - back then it was expensive to host a website and hugely expensive to add CGI (I think Demon wanted maybe £300 a month for that?) and the money ran out after a year. If they'd been able to keep it funded for, say, another 2-3 years, until home internet was more accessible, I think they'd have been in a pretty good position to own UK classifieds on the web (at least for a while.)

Webvan vs. Instacart. So many dead startups that are brought back because they were just too soon.
> So many dead startups that are brought back because they were just too soon.

I recently had a recruiter from color.com reach out to me...

Dang that's fascinating