[mritun]

… and money. Two years ago before he wrote that check, he sold his last startup for a cool $220M.

Money begets money!

[verdverm]

Don't forget they tried to sell their search engine to Yahoo and others for $1m, and only started Google after no one would buy it.

[quickthrower2]

If that had happened maybe a trillion dollars of productivity since would have been lost!

[verdverm]

I would suspect much more, they are responsible for things like map-reduce, containers, kubernetes, golang, android, Gmail, and so much more. Things billions of people use directly or indirectly every day

[throw0101b]

> If that had happened maybe a trillion dollars of productivity since would have been lost!

On the flip side, how much productivity has been lost because of Youtube? ;)

[DANmode]

That spins an entirely new theoretical, because YouTube wasn't made by Google — could someone else have popularized it to the same extent?

[verdverm]

How much have you learned on YouTube as well?

[latency-guy2]

Don't you mean a trillion dollars of luck as way too many people on this thread and adjacent bring up?

Considering this website, I find it hilarious how the most common talking point on this post is all "luck", like it's a conspiracy. You'd imagine "risk" would come up even once, but a few hours in, I am the only one bringing it up.

[quickthrower2]

Not sure what you mean? Productivity here is in aggregate over the whole economy, whereas luck might come into it where you say "person X got rich off there idea - they were smart, worked hard, but they also needed some luck, such as being born next door to $influencial_person or whatever lucky thing they had.

[latency-guy2]

I guess that no matter what, it's impossible to believe people made things and the magical forces of the universe made it so only a specific people gets to make these things.

[ElfinTrousers]

Which is how he was able to write two students a "modest" check for $100,000.