[PaulDavisThe1st]

We don't need the hyper-successful, certainly not the way you're defining them.

In a society of 350 millions people that is vaguely capitalistic, there will always be people who "win big". The "high end" people are just the living manifestation of serendipidity. If it wasn't Bezos, it would have been someone else.

Also, "the high-end people create the new companies" is almost complete BS. The mythology of the exceptional individual that dominates the USA promotes this story, but the reality is that successful companies are the result of the collaborative, cooperative efforts of many different people (many of them not "high-end"). A company like Amazon was created by a constellation of people with very different backgrounds, socio-economic status and intent.

[jokethrowaway]

You could have been #2 at Amazon but I've seen plenty of companies to fail because their founders screw up the company.

Saying Bezos just won is simply dishonest. His ideas and approach had an impact.

[sangnoir]

> Saying Bezos just won is simply dishonest. His ideas and approach had an impact.

If Bezos never existed, or chose to become a theoretical physicist,there would have been another company filling the niche(s) with some other founder who didn't screw up the company.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

"Not screwing up the company" is a necessary but insufficient condition for startup success.

I did not say that "Bezos just won" nor that his ideas and approach had no impact. As has been noted by others in this sub-thread, the point is that if it had not been Bezos (because he stayed at D.E. Shaw, or fucked up early Amazon) it would have been someone else. Capitalism abhors a vacuum.

[seibelj]

I just find your logic so defeatist. “Someone will win”. It’s like saying “someone is the fastest runner, so why bother trying”.

Yes, someone will always be the best at something. But you can be better than the best. That’s the whole point of human striving.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

(1) by definition you cannot be better than the best.

(2) "someone will win" is a description of a competition. If it was a marathon, and your goal was to win, and you knew that there were 500 runners capable of running more than 30 minutes faster than you, why would you enter the marathon. You will NOT win.

(3) there are other goals in life besides winning (for example, what i've done since leaving amazon after just over a year). you can pour almost unlimited amounts of energy, time and love into something without the need to be declared "the winner", and indeed, this is what most people do with most of their lives. you may choose to run a marathon despite knowing that you cannot possibly win the race. you may even choose to run a marathon knowing you will be slower than the last time you tried. running is not a good metaphor or analogy for business "competition".

(4) there are lots of contexts that are nothing like a marathon. you don't know who will be participating. you don't know how good they are. you don't know how good you are. you may not even fully understand what the criteria for "winning" are. nevertheless, you will still be "competing" with others, and you may choose to participate in that for reasons that are much more complicated than "i want to win" (though that might be one of them).

(5) if you do not have intrinsic motivation, you will likely be unable to show sufficient dedication to succeed in a competitive business environment. so you'd better have at least that. maybe it comes because your arrogance makes you want to prove to the world how good you are. maybe it comes because you're really, deeply convinced that your idea will make the world a better place. but it had better be some sort of motivation beyond "i just want to win" - that's almost never enough to succeed.

(6) so let's assume that you do have an excellent level of intrinsic motivation. let's say you have an excellent idea. let's say you have excellent ideas about to build a company and a product/service. these are all necessary ingredients for success. but will any of them guarantee it? no, they will not.

(7) if you're the kind of person who matches (6) but believes the success is purely a result of what you (and perhaps others) bring to the effort, you're likely to be rather surprised. the chances are that despite your motivation, excellent ideas and management, you will fail. you will fail in a very ordinary way: the way that most people fail - a combination of bad luck, perhaps a handful of minor errors, maybe one or two major ones. if you're aware of this, and it stops you from even starting, that's probably for the best in the contemporary US economy. not wanting to do something without a guaranteed win is likely negatively correlated with actual success.

(8) on the other hand, if you're aware of this, but your intrinsic motivation is still high enough to make a go of it, then go for it. this will not change your chances of success (at least not much) - chances are you will fail. but you're the type of person who is OK with this. you know that every once in a while, someone (probably someone like you) will succeed beyond anyone's expectations, and that adds to your own intrinsic motivation sufficiently to make it worth the risk - the likelihood - of failure.

(9) people like the ones who match (8) are why we have amazon and its ilk.

The problem is [ EDIT: NOT ] that people like this exist, nor that they behave as they do. The problem is believing that:

(a) the results of their own self-belief and efforts to validate that are always good for society

(b) good things only arise from this sort of person

(c) the corrollary of (b), that people who are not like this can not create things that are good for society

a, b and c are all demonstrably provably false, both in modern times, and throughout the span of human history.

[seibelj]

I simply can't understand your point(s). I'm honestly trying, and re-read this 3 times.

Should no one ever try? Or is it only in the context of business?

Furthermore, who are your heroes, and why do they fulfill the criteria of your success metrics? Or is every single successful person merely an unthinking automaton living a preordained existence?

[seibelj]

Disagree entirely. Yes, a company is an assemblage of people. No, the guy working the warehouse couldn’t have built Amazon. Bezos is special talent.

[giantrobot]

> Bezos is special talent.

Having family wealthy enough to invest in his early business is a kind of talent I guess. As is being in the right place at the right time. If Bezos lost all of his money tomorrow he could never make it a second time.

[jokethrowaway]

Having followed what Bezos did and pushed as company culture, I disagree completely.

I wouldn't want to work at Amazon (there are certainly better pay / stress jobs out there), but I believe the way their individual teams work is the key to success and what most large organisations get wrong. I just think the teams should get more bonuses / equity tied in their team success in order for it to be fair for team members. It's basically build-your-startup level of stress but you're working for Bezos.

Similarly the general strategy of reinvesting in Amazon and spinning off AWS was just pure genius.

There's a lot to learn from Bezos.

[seibelj]

Plenty of people can get investment. There is only one Amazon. If things are so easy, go do it yourself.

Starting a company and growing it to the size of Amazon is extremely difficult. It doesn’t happen by luck or happenstance. It takes highly skilled management in addition to market timing.

Luck isn’t what makes people successful. Hard working people put themselves out there and increase the opportunities for lucky events, but without the hard work and effort the luck wouldn’t be able to happen.

Looking at successful people and pointing out some advantage they have is just a coping mechanism. Assuming you don’t have some disability, no one is stopping you from succeeding except yourself.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> Starting a company and growing it to the size of Amazon is extremely difficult.

That is almost certainly true. But what you don't get is that there are dozens (maybe many more) constantly striving to do just that. When some of them of succeed, why would you be surprised? Why would it be surprising or special when a system designed to cause people to strive for this kind of success actually results in it happening to some of them, and not to most of them? There's nothing remarkable about the fact of a particular corporation's success: there was always going to be a corporate success, just as there were always going to be way more corporate failures. That's how the system is designed. That's what it is there to do. It's not a reason to idolize or even respect those who happened to be on the winning team.

Before you say much more, you should probably be aware that I was the #2 employee at Amazon.

[notahacker]

> Before you say much more, you should probably be aware that I was the #2 employee at Amazon.

You popping up to disagree about how remarkable Amazon's success was is the most HN exchange I've seen since "did you win the Putnam"![1]

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

[seibelj]

And I’m the CTO of a unicorn I helped build from nothing! We have different opinions yet lived similar experiences.

I do respect and idolize the winners. Saying “someone would have done it if we didn’t” is defeatist. No one does anything unless someone does it. So we respect the people who actually do it rather than critique from the sidelines. It’s depressing to me that you were part of something amazing yet you view yourself as a replaceable cog and the success a meaningless byproduct of a system outside of your control.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Nobody within a particular human organization is a replaceable cog (well, at least that's an ideal that I think it is reasonable to aspire to, even if it's not technically true in a great many instances).

But just as you shouldn't be surprised when you visit a forest that there are some really big trees, some not so big, and some dead trees because that's how forests work, you shouldn't be surprised that when you survey the American corporate landscape, there are some huge successes, some moderate ones and lots of failures.

Sure, there was something about that much larger tree that made it nearly twice the size of its neighbors. But it was just as likely to be luck of where it germinated, luck of when it germinated, and yes, perhaps some good genes. Still, the idea that it was all the genes and that we've just discovered the uber-tree is mostly absurd.

And so it is with companies. The successful ones are most the product of an intersection of different kinds of luck with some necessary-but-insufficient features of their people. We've built a mythology in the USA that mostly all that matters is the nature of a few early founders (or perhaps the occasional turn-it-around later hire). I think this is demonstrably false. That doesn't make success a "meaningless byproduct of a system outside [your] control". It means that idolizing particular instances of success as being based on people distorts our understanding of how success actually happens (and how it doesn't).

I believe in intrinsic motivation - especially having worked with Bezos for a little while - and I do not think that we should, as a society, be providing motivation to people through the promise of fame and fortune. This is typically something that distorts and misdirects human effort and imagination. I also don't believe that we need to offer that motivation, at least certainly not to the extent that we currently do.

To whatever extent Amazon is amazing, it is also a mixture of good and bad, and I strongly regret that as individuals our society tends to focus so much more on the good and ignores the bad (the media over the last few years have begun to rebalance this, but it needs to go much further).

[oblio]

> I do respect and idolize the winners.

Don't do that, it's toxic. Everything becomes about winning and losing and that's how you end up with an opioid epidemic.

[giantrobot]

> It doesn’t happen by luck or happenstance. It takes highly skilled management in addition to market timing.

Market timing is just a euphemism for luck.

> Luck isn’t what makes people successful. Hard working people put themselves out there and increase the opportunities for lucky events, but without the hard work and effort the luck wouldn’t be able to happen.

Bullshit. Hard work without luck is often just hard work.

> Looking at successful people and pointing out some advantage they have is just a coping mechanism. Assuming you don’t have some disability, no one is stopping you from succeeding except yourself.

This just sounds like self-help seminar platitudes. I'm recognizing Bezos had advantages lots of other people did not have. He's was a well off white male with connections in the US. He would be notable if he didn't have some manner of success.

Discounting the luck of circumstances is foolish. Idolize Bezos for his business acumen but there's no need to white knight for him if someone points out he started off on second base when you're claiming he hit a home run.

[seibelj]

And a famous musician had parents with the means and ability to purchase lessons and encourage them to practice. I still say the musician should be respected and praised. We can play this game all day. Some will say no one does anything on their own, but I say creating Amazon is an incredible accomplishment worth of praise and study.