[no_wizard]

would you mind giving a greater explanation of what they mean by this? I couldn't grok the meaning from context, other than the obvious its not really possible to simply startup half baked out of your house or something along those lines

[monknomo]

What I took from it is that the story about starting a company in a garage is about the humble origins.

But to start a company in a garage you must have access to a garage; lots of people do not have this level of resources. The origins of these companies are not as humble as they sound, they rely access to resources that are not actually common (unless you look from the POV of a well-offish 'middle class' family)

[oceanplexian]

Nah, I'll correct the record because anyone who worked hard enough absolutely had access to "that level of resources"

My grandparents, First generation immigrants without a college degree bought a beautiful single family house in 1960s Northern California on a working class salary. In fact they lived across the street from George Lucas (My grandmother knew his parents). They too, were a completely average, middle class family. Not any different from Steve Jobs or the hundreds of other success stories.

Over the course of the 80s, 90s, and 00s, the same city and cities like it became notorious for crime and gang violence, homes became unaffordable, and the conditions that allowed someone to "start a company out of a garage" was wiped out as society stratified into the super rich and the super poor. Which should serve as a cautionary tale of any place that is thinking of emulating the California success story.

[BobaFloutist]

Right, but having parents that worked hard enough to get that level of resources is another kind of luck.

[jacobsenscott]

Having a garage isn't enough. A lot of people with garages need to work everyday to pay for their garage, and food, and everything else. Bezos and Jobs both had free garages and free time paid for by their parents. I would bet the others mentioned in the post had the same sort of freebies.

[throwaway-blaze]

Is the contrapositive also true? If Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos had been dirt poor in childhood rather than solidly middle class, would they not have had success? I.e. how much weight should we put on the things out of their control vs within their control?

[bluefirebrand]

It is impossible to know of course, but it is probably fair to say that if they had been born dirt poor they would have been much less likely to have the kind if incredible success that they did have

People like to say that success is right time, right place, but that's not all there is to it. You also need sufficient resources to take advantage of opportunity

Sitting on a gold mine does not matter if you don't have a shovel

Having a shovel doesn't matter if you don't know where to dig

And you need to have enough time ('runway' in startup speak) to actually try digging for gold in the first place

[ryandrake]

The cartoon "On A Plate"[1] comes to mind in this discussion.

1: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilswo...

[bluefirebrand]

Thanks for sharing, this is spot on

[Nevermark]

You need enough of both.

Few would suggest anyone having time, a place, necessities covered well enough, and few distractions is going to be ensured success.

But with those things, someone who also has ideas, insights, a strong work ethic (or often much better, a strong natural enthusiasm for something useful) has much better chances.

[tdrz]

I got a lot of freebies from my parents and never been able to build a multi-billion dollar company.

I do believe you need someone to have your back for the basics, but there's much more to it.

[mixmastamyk]

Yes, though in the eighties and somewhat to the nineties you could own a home with modest job.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

That was the era before globalization hollowed out the middle class

[mixmastamyk]

Ok, though believe the major factor was a refusal to build enough new housing.

[PeterFBell]

If you live with your parent in a double wide in a trailer park and need to work at the local Target every night since high school to make enough money to help pay for groceries for the family, you might have a harder time working 100 hour weeks on the off chance that you'll raise a round and start a company. You probably also don't know many VC's or live too close to where they hang out.

Anyone can start a billion dollar business. Anyone who does so is probably extremely smart and extremely hard working. There are some very smart, hard working folks for whom the path to starting a company is harder than for others.

[ryandrake]

It means these guys didn't literally start from nothing. They had a house in the suburbs with a garage, and that implies at least some level of funding and privilege. A leg up that the guy in the trailer park might not have.

[mbrumlow]

Sure. But I think the notion is that a huge group of people also had that same level funding and privilege, but did nothing with it.

Like why did these guys neighbors not end up billionaire. Or the other people in their class or school.

While they may have had some money it’s not like they took fathers 500 billion and turned it in to a nice 200 billion for them self.

They clearly did something different out of the very large common group they belonged to.

[ryandrake]

> They clearly did something different

Survivorship bias that results from looking back at the winners. If we asked 1000 people to flip a coin 10 times, probability says one will end up flipping heads 10 times in a row. Looking only backwards after the fact, what did he do different? Is he just a better coin flipper?

There is likely a person in their 20s right now who in 40 years we will look back on because they founded the world's first $100T company. Who is it? If we knew it was deterministic and that some "thing they did" caused success, we would all just do that thing.

[dgfitz]

I think the point is, most people don't even flip the coin, you're making a false equivalence.

[bluefirebrand]

Realistically most people don't get many opportunities to flip the coin

Then many who do get that chance choose not to, they choose a less risky path

It is very few people who even can attempt to flip the coin ten times

And "the 1%" can flip it as many times as they want until it lands on heads 10 times in a row

[ryandrake]

Instead of coin flipping, I look at it like a baseball game:

Most people are never even given an at-bat. They're born without money/opportunity (on the bench), and they will have to stay on the bench for life.

Some working / middle class people get one or two at-bats. They swing and maybe hit the home run, but maybe instead have a safe base hit or they strike out. That was their chance. Afterwards they're out of money/opportunity.

The top 0.1% or so get as many at-bats as they want. Their parents own the team and the ballpark so they just keep swinging until they get their home run, and then spend the rest of the game talking about how life is a meritocracy, and you succeed by being the best.

[ambicapter]

I think the false equivalence is in your very comment, the point GP is making is that everyone is flipping the coin, just that one guy will get heads 100 times in a row, and the vast majority of people won't.

[layer8]

Most people don’t want to end up in debt in the likely case that the coin-flipping doesn’t succeed.

[shadowgovt]

There is only but so much room in the capital ecosystem for billionaires, even when you factor in creation of wealth through resource-extraction and refinement or labor.

We hear much from the Jobs and Gates of society, and little from the other garage-folk who just didn't make it: they ran out of time, ran out of steam, ran out of funding, or were doing something that would have worked great and made them billionaires if Apple hadn't hit the market three months sooner than them.

Billionaires in garages are a confirmation-bias story.

[jacobsenscott]

Random chance, and maybe a little skill.

[bluefirebrand]

Don't forget connections

Having well connected parents and family is huge, and a big part of why a lot of these people are so wildly successful

[FuriouslyAdrift]

That's how Elizabeth Holmes went from a rando Stanford drop out to a "billionaire"

Her father was head of a Federal govt agency at one point and a VP at Enron (I know, I know).

Also, a direct descendant of the Fleischmann yeast family.

Her mother also had worked as a Congressional aide.

[Jensson]

Everyone starts with something, the guy in the trailer park is thousands times better off than the guy in the savannah. But an average person in USA starts out with a garage, that isn't a high bar.

[indoordin0saur]

These successes come from the middle-class, not the working classes. You could take it further and note that even just owning a home as a young person isn't really attainable for the middle-class anymore. Things were simply easier back then.

[masfuerte]

It's saying that even just having a garage is a privilege.

[mensetmanusman]

Even being able to type in a comment box is a privilege, as is life.

[groby_b]

Meanwhile, you're missing the wider point: You don't get to claim "everybody can do this from nothing" if the "nothing" is actually a substantial amount of implicit access to resources.

Nobody (well, few) begrudge that privilege, but you cannot have a reasonable discussion about what led to success by leaving out major factors.

[jackphilson]

Even the amount of agency you have is a privilege. Hard determinism.