[dmk23]

This just goes to show that the most critical ingredient to success is determination and focus, not any specific training.

If you are committed to a goal, picking up any specific hands-on skills (coding included) is just the matter of sticking to it.

Something to keep in mind when hiring.

[melling]

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On, has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race."

Calvin Coolidge

"If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it."

John Carmack

[ojbyrne]

I'm finding it challenging to find indications of "persistence." He did some coding at night for what sounds like a few months (this is the baseline effort for 99% of the people who live in Silicon Valley). Then he went to a party, where he was handed $500k.

[villagefool]

Is it still true? can you actually do much nowdays (in that scale) on a cheap PC? it seems like heavy machines/cloud access is crucial

[reitzensteinm]

You can serve insane amounts of users on a single $200 a month server from Softlayer (or EC2). It's not uncommon for many types of businesses (that charge real money) to do $250k-$1m in revenue a year per server as powerful as that.

Some types of free services that go out of their way to build traffic at the expense of revenue, or computation intensive services like real time audio/video may be exceptions to that rule.

Some anecdotal evidence - I ran a cacheless Django site that more than made the server costs back monthly via a single Adsense unit, in the gaming sector where eCPMs are rubbish, and the files you serve are huge, and the server was never at any point at more than 20% utilisation.

By and large, the cloud has lowered the barriers to entry. Unless you're running Justin.tv, server costs are down in the noise. Getting users is the hard part; serving them pages is not.

[matwood]

A cheap PC today is way more powerful than PCs of just a couple years ago. Server rooms have shrunk not just because of the cloud, but because the same amount of work can get done with less machine.

John Carmacks quote becomes more pertinent as time goes on because computing power is only becoming cheaper. And to directly address your point, the common person now has access to more computing power than ever before at a cost lower than ever in history because of the cloud.

If anything the barriers to entry continue to drop leaving only our lack of persistence as what stands between us and success.

[ceph_]

>Server rooms have shrunk not just because of the cloud, but because the same amount of work can get done with less machine.

The demand for servers and compute power has increased because of the cloud. Just because server rooms have turned into datacenters does not mean they "shrunk", quite the opposite.

[matwood]

When I started at my previous company we had a server room that was full of computers. When I left we had consolidated to a single rack, and nothing had been moved to the cloud. While the companies demand for compute power went up during the time I worked there, the compute power available in a single machine went up faster than the demand.

[bad_user]

You've been spoiled.

Cheap PCs in your basement, or cheap VPS machines are perfectly acceptable for starting out. Also, if you're conscious about performance and have good bandwidth, you can serve insane amounts of traffic from a single server.

[gtani]

In US Costco's, where i mostly buy non-apple they mostly stock HP, Toshiba and Dell laptops. 6G RAM, duo core I5 is typically $600-700.

Cloudwise EC2 is trending down, Heroku starts free with reasonable limits, and VPS with 500M memory at Linode is $20/mon.

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2012/03/05/new-low...

[intended]

Success is not reducible to some key rules. His first prototype idea got $500k seed from Baseline and AH. Thats after putting together a basic HTML5 Game mashup of foursquare and mafia wars.

I could interpret the article to say that being determined and focused, while being ready for opportunities, are the critical ingredients to success.

Saying that determination and focus are key ingredients - is just taking an event and looking at it through your own personal lens.

Heck, you could have been the hardest worker, and a genius, but if your name was Nikola Tesla your end result would still be penury.

[gruseom]

if your name was Nikola Tesla your end result would still be penury

If you had been Tesla, your "end result" would be that you were Tesla.

[MatthewPhillips]

My take away was that he had connections that let him pursue his ideas more than just as a weekend project.

[pclark]

He just went to a party. He didn't have rolodex of investors or anything.

[MatthewPhillips]

He went to a party where Andreessen Horowitz happened to also be attending. I'm assuming he didn't crash this party. I didn't say he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, just that he was in a position where his hard work was likely to be recognized.

[dudeguy999]

Come out to SV and hustle. It's not that hard to attend a party with a VC firm. It's their job to be approachable.

[mikecane]

Being at that party is precisely what luck is all about.

[joering2]

?? what does him going to the party knowing that Horowitz will be there has to do with luck??

[matwood]

Luck is commonly referred to as being ready when an opportunity presents itself.

[cellis]

He also went to Stanford.

[mladenkovacevic]

This is a huge deal. Not for the quality of the education (although there's that too) but also for the branding and network it gives you access to.

[mikecane]

Read the history of Hollywood. Not a single person who formed the major studios -- Cohn, Mayer, Goldwyn, etc -- ever created a movie themselves.

[Maro]

On the other hand, there are plenty of people with determination and focus who aren't successful in the Instagram sense of walking away with $100M+ after 2 years of work.

[melling]

True, like the guys at Rovio. It took years before they had success.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rovio_Entertainment

[brunohq]

still, you can be successful without making millions.

[skinnymuch]

Looking at how society as a whole generally/broadly defines "success", yes, there are a few cases were not making millions or more is still considered [extremely] successful, but more often than not, "success" at the level of people like the founders of Instagram usually means making bank.

I am in no way agreeing or disagreeing with this notion of "success", just stating how I think society in general broadly feels.

[intended]

Heck the OP has such a vague definition of success (it changes from lines 1 to lines 3) that its basically discussion bait/fluff.

Line 1 basically refers to stuff like learning code, while line 2 seems to allude to success in terms of making bank.

[ed209]

depends on your definition of success

[viking]

Yes, the founders benefit a lot from keeping their identity small. Their identity should not be as a CEO, CTO, programmer, marketer, non-technical, etc. A founder need to have a flexible identity and learn as needed.

However, the flip side of the coin is that it's a great weakness if you don't know what you don't know. It's only when you know you don't know that you can find someone to fill in for that or expand your skills. Because in the end it's what you do that counts.

[teja1990]

Absolutely.Determination , hard work and commitment.This is what college taught, it doesn't matter how smart you are , if you don't work hard . It will all go waste.

[joering2]

unfortunately its only half true. i know bunch of people that were lazy like a beach bum and got rich whether because of work of other people or because of luck.

the sad truth is, that there are no set in stone rules how to become successful. perhaps its good, because otherwise if everyone would get successful, nobody would be successful.

think it this way: imagine solid set of rules how to hit jackpot in lotto. if everyone would read those rules and applied, then everyone would win... a dollar.

yes, hard work is important. yes, who you know is important. yes, idea and execution is important. yes, luck and timing is important too. but deliberating that you cant success without this or that is a pure waste of time.

[lusr]

Yup. Since you cannot (as far as I know) influence luck or good fortune, your only option if you want to succeed is to hedge your bets and make as great an intelligent effort as possible. I'm still struggling with the 'intelligent' part...

[brunohq]

I truly believe that talent helps but it doesn't take you as far as determination, focus, passion and ambition. If you want it badly enough you will make it.

[skinnymuch]

> If you want it badly enough you will make it.

That's nice to think. Hell, I wish I had your tenacious optimisim, but you'd have to be willfully avoiding reality to truly believe this is always the case. Sadly, it just is not.

[brunohq]

I'll bet that optimism is another trait shared by those who actually make it. ;)

[skinnymuch]

Well people like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates either directly or indirectly disagree with your assessment. At first I thought you were simply being wide-eyed optimistic. However, now it actually seems insulting that you just seem to hand wave around and assume the traits people have who "make it".

[brunohq]

don't take me wrong here. sometimes I tend to hyperbolize my own statements to cross sell what I believe in. you're right. My point is, I try to avoid negativity all around (thoughts, people, environments, etc...) in order to achieve my own goals. That as been working for me so far. I haven't "make it" yet, but I'll do someday. What do you think about that?

I should read more about Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.

[dshaw002]

Intelligence and an understanding of the market helps out a lot, too. You can be determined and focused and making something, and it could not be that successful (assuming success in making a lot of money is your goal)