[nostrademons]

A corollary to this: if you want to be a badass entrepreneur, focus on getting lucky.

The people who really strike it rich - the Elon Musks, Larry Pages, Evan Williamses, Marc Andreessens, Steve Jobses, Mark Zuckerburgs, et al - all seem to devote significant thought and attention to figuring out where the opportunities are that are almost ripe for a company to come in and pick them. To an outsider, it looks like they single-handedly changed the course of history, but if you read in-depth biographies or listen to them speak in person and then try to trace through what their thought process might be, there's a lot of attention to paid to what social or technical trends are just on the cusp of developing, and what the implications of them are. Good entrepreneurs realize that they can't do it alone, so they're always looking out for things that lots of people want to have happen, but need a slight catalyst to get things moving.

[ryancarson]

I don't think "focus on getting lucky" is quite right either.

I didn't sift through all the available opportunities and choose changing education. I was personally interested in this problem - it mattered to me on an emotional level. I've interviewed Evan Williams and Mark Zuckerberg personally and I see the same pattern there.

It kind of sucks to say "You just need to be interested personally in solving a problem" but it's true. I don't think you can simply identify a problem and solve it, without the personal passion.

[nostrademons]

Maybe this is a quirk of my personality, but I'm interested personally in solving a lot of problems. From what I saw of Larry Page's decision-making when I was at Google, this was true of him as well. From there, it's a matter of choosing the intersection of that set with the set of problems that many other people want solved and the set of problems that you personally have the ability to make a dent in right now.

Business books like to talk about the "hedgehog" principle:

http://ilead.byuh.edu/node/133

This is what it means in practice. It helps if all of the sets are relatively large, and the intersection is quite narrowly focused. Usually when I've had "small" successes (projects beloved by a handful of users, but not enough to make any money), it's because I was following my passion but not considering how many other people cared about the problem. When I've had outright failures (like the graveyard of projects that I never completed), it was when I followed my passion for a project that large amounts of people would want, but didn't pay any attention to whether the problem was tractable with the resources I had available to me.

[ryancarson]

Interesting that you were at Google. What did you do there?

I'm just finishing "I'm Feeling Lucky" about Google's early days.

[nostrademons]

I was in Search from 2009-2014. Worked on a bunch of projects - 3 visual redesigns, the Authorship program, some miscellaneous infrastructure & internal research projects, 3 interactive homepage doodles, about 1/3 of the easter eggs you see on Wikipedia's list of Google easter eggs, loaned out to GFiber and G+ for their launches, a few other things. It was already a big company by the time I got there, but I had the pleasure of working with several folks who'd been there since it was just a couple hundred people. It was also a pretty interesting time in its history - the first half of my tenure was when Bing was still considered a scary competitor, so we pushed out a lot of innovations in a short time period - and I straddled the Eric Schmidt / Larry Page CEO turnover, so had experience under both CEOs.

[ryancarson]

You should blog about it!

[nostrademons]

Some day, maybe. For now, I'm much more focused on getting my next great adventure off the ground (which I'm also not really seeking publicity for...my cofounder and I are trying to go directly to target users for feedback and not the general public). Plus, one thing I learned at Google is that there are a large number of employees that do awesome work without seeking credit for it...I was happy to be one of them at the time, and I don't really want to steal the limelight from them.

[toomuchtodo]

> I don't think you can simply identify a problem and solve it, without the personal passion.

Sam Altman indicates this is true in his first lecture at Stanford's startup course.

[fivedogit]

Oh I think you absolutely can. In 2002-3 I worked at a PR firm in DC and identified a shortcoming we were experiencing regarding broadcast TV monitoring. I quit my job, built a distributed TV ingestion system + SaaS interface and signed 75 customers to paying subscriptions over the course of a few years.

Did I have any "passion" for broadcast monitoring? Absolutely not. I merely had a passion for starting a successful business.

[coralreef]

Interesting contrast to PG's earlier convention of "the idea doesn't matter as much as the founders because the idea can/will change".

[pinkyand]

Maybe for some people, their passion lies in money/fame/etc ,but they see very clearly how attacking said opportunity would lead to those, and it gives them enough "passion" and motivation?

[ryancarson]

I pity someone who is 'passionate' about those things.

[no_future]

There is a miasma of fakery and posturing in the startup world about making money, everyone pretends as if they are so passionate about what they are doing and not interested in money at all, even though they are almost certainly interested in money to some degree. I guess they feel that being at all motivated by monetary gain cheapens their image. Reminds me of an article I recently read about attitudes surrounding money in French culture, pretty interesting:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/12/no-exit-3

You can be passionate about what you are doing and interested in making money as well, it isn't either or. Personally I have no shame admitting I would be delighted to make an obscene amount of money in a short period of time, because to me money means freedom. I could spend time with people I love and do things I find interesting and enjoyable, rather than living for the next paycheck and having money end up owning me and my life as is the case with so many people who pursue high stress, high paying long term careers to "provide for their family" and end up miserable and distant. Another reason is that, call me entitled and selfish, but I don't enjoy the idea of working for someone else, likely doing something I'm only marginally passionate about, and having them take majority of the value of my efforts while giving me a fixed salary, though for many people I'm sure the stability of this is perfectly acceptable.

However, I do agree probably nothing good will come of you if you are motivated purely by profit with 0 interest or passion in what you are doing. I select projects that I am personally interested in simply because I find it extremely difficult to work on things that I don't get excited about.

[CyberDildonics]

I think it's simplistic to say that someone attacking a problem because they think it will be profitable is intrinsically shallow. There could be many problems that a person sees they could solve, and they could choose one most likely to be profitable first a stepping stone to make the others easier.

Also some things are said to be difficult, and that alone gives certain types of people motivation to solve them, since they feel a certain type of disconnect with their intuition of what is possible and what other people around them are telling them.

[r12s]

Yeah, me too. While I'm at it, really loved the post, made me smile (a lot). So you're "fourth time lucky" ;-)

[tedks]

Such an arrogant attitude. As if you'd be working on what you're working on if it didn't get you money or power. One is the other, really.

No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end.

The truly powerful people in the world -- the ones whose names you don't know, because they don't particularly care for your knowing them -- they never lie to themselves, and they probably know exactly where their passions are. The less powerful people, the Jeff Bezos's and the Larry Ellisons, they probably learned over time.

The people who think they do what they do for any other reason are deluding themselves about the game that they're playing. There's only one game.

[PhasmaFelis]

> No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end.

If you're going to be that reductionist, then you're still wrong. The basic evolutionary drive behind our species, and all others, is to reproduce and spread your genes. Everything else stems, however circuitously, from redirected or misdirected reproductive drive.

But either way, you're being silly. For example, I want to make enough money to support myself and afford a few luxuries now and then, and have as much free time as possible to spend with friends, books, and games. It's not technically incorrect to say that I want power (over my life and environment), but to say that my motivations are identical to those of a senator or a billionaire is ridiculous.

> The people who think they do what they do for any other reason are deluding themselves about the game that they're playing. There's only one game.

See, here's your problem, speaking of delusion. You've let the people playing the game of power trick you into thinking that their game is the only one in town.

[tedks]

>The basic evolutionary drive behind our species, and all others, is to reproduce and spread your genes. Everything else stems, however circuitously, from redirected or misdirected reproductive drive.

Actually, it's you who's misdirected. Increasing inclusive fitness is the end, not the means, of an evolutionary adaptation. In humans, and in other social species like great apes, the evolutionary adaptation that exists in the species is the desire for power over the environment. A species is an adaptation-executor, not a fitness-maximizer.

>but to say that my motivations are identical to those of a senator or a billionaire is ridiculous.

It's a matter of ambition, and degree, isn't it? Plenty of people who are otherwise powerless take power through drugs. It's the same game. Some people win more objectively than others.

[ryancarson]

The reason I pity people who are passionate about power or money is because I have experienced much greater happiness in loving and being loved, unconditionally. The strongest of those loves are from my wife, my kids, my sisters and my mom and dad. None of those folks love me because of power or money.

I've had a couple things that would demonstrate me having money like a super expensive watch, a brand new Audi, a big house, etc. They were great for getting fleeting "Wow, he's got money!" glances from folks. Then I realized their like for me was related to stuff, not me. It just all seemed very vacuous.

[tedks]

It's beyond me to pick apart another person's relationships, but at the end of the day, there are very few things humans like and seek out in relationships that are not related to power. We find attractive the things that convey status and economic security; we love our parents (and our children) because they provide for us. There's a reason why beautiful people have straight teeth and clean features rather than looking disheveled. Even in subcultures predicated on being so ~nonconformist~ and iconoclastic, people brush their teeth.

I'm sure your family and your relationships are very different and that all the love in your life is totally unconditional and moreover, totally uncorrelated with your ability to command resources. I hope you never fall upon hard times but if you did, I'm sure every relationship you have would survive it. Best of luck with your startup, it looks like a great idea and you're obviously good at executing. More resources look to be on your horizons.

[blueprint]

Almost everyone in today's world confuses love and attachment. They misunderstand love as attachment, and attachment as love.

However, the term love contains a very important meaning. We can't say that we really live properly as humans without understanding what love is.

That's why I'd like to ask you something. I hope you don't mind my question. When you say "love", what do you mean by that term? What do you indicate?

[wpietri]

> No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end.

Demonstrably wrong.

Desire for power is certainly common among primates, but there are a number of basic drives. Drives people have it in different amounts. Further, there's no particular reason to think it was a huge evolutionary driver for us.

If you're really looking for the evolutionary driver that made us what we are, it might be a taste for cooked food. [1] You could also make a case for tool usage, or an arms race in language capability, a peacock's tail that happened to let us do far more than woo mates.

And even if power were a major drive, it doesn't really tell us much about what we should do. People are naturally violent, but we mostly set that aside. What's natural tells us nothing about what's right.

Of course you won't believe me, because you write like a fundamentalist. You can't tell a Freudian that it isn't about sex or a Baptist that it isn't all about God. Fundamentalism always makes me a little sad because it's so stunting.

It'd as if somebody put on a pair of blue-tinted glasses and ran around insisting that since they only see blue things, blue is the only real color and everybody else is just fooling themselves. They can't quite get that "everything they see" isn't only about everything; its also about how they see.

Could you be pulling our legs? When you call him arrogant and then explain how only you understand the deep, hidden truths of the world, it's kooky enough that I wonder if you're just trolling.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/14...

[tedks]

>Further, there's no particular reason to think it was a huge evolutionary driver for us.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=bV9yeFV6_ckC&oi=f...

>People are naturally violent, but we mostly set that aside

This is the most demonstrably wrong thing. Try killing a man and say that you are naturally violent. Humans are social animals and to commit violence against one another is very difficult for us. The people who do not have this trait we call sociopaths. The people who harm others for a living do so at the cost of massive psychological trauma, probably unhealable, and the best and most effective killers have to be taught how to kill for years and years by people who have made it their job to teach how to kill, based on years of research and development of new ways to break people down and build them into war machines.

The most common response to seeing death is to vomit, and you say people are naturally violent? What do you know of violence?

>Could you be pulling our legs? When you call him arrogant and then explain how only you understand the deep, hidden truths of the world, it's kooky enough that I wonder if you're just trolling.

I think it's condescending and ironically, a status-grab to say something like "I pity people who directly pursue the thing I acquire by doing other things. I am better than they are, because I pursue these other, distinct things, that wholly coincidentally lead to the thing these other people pursue. How pitiful they are."

[tjradcliffe]

"Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power." --Oscar Wilde. [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6218-everything-in-the-worl...]

Mate competition is a powerful force in human evolution. Evidence: males are 20% larger than females, and the ancient male breeding population is about half the size of the total male population (these are utterly uncontroversial facts, and if you ask any biologist about them without mentioning the species they will say, "Mate competition, moderate polygamy.")

"Power" is the power to mate with the highest status member of the opposite sex available. You'll note this is a gender-free definition.

To deny this is to deny evolution, as it applies to humans. As you correctly point out, what is in our evolutionary history is not what is "right", but unless we are willing to surface that history and examine it in the cold light of day we're like to make a large number of very bad decisions.

So the OP is correct: "No human alive doesn't want power". It does not follow from this "Seeking power by any means available is right." Nor does it mean "Formal hierarchy is the best form of social organization." Sometimes "power" means "the power to boink the lady of the manor". Or as Aristotle might have put it: "Power is said in many ways."

But compared to all other influences on human behaviour, mate competition is pretty important. We forget that at our peril, because it might lead us to weaken social institutions--like monogamy--that tend to undermine mate competition's role as a social organizing principle.

[tjradcliffe]

To do any serious analysis of entrepreneurship you must include a population in your study that "did everything right" and still failed.

Studies of successful entrepreneurs are nothing but confirmation bias in action. Sure you can point to N successful people who did X, Y and Z, and follow that with an unjustified claim that X, Y and Z are the keys to the kingdom, but unless you go out and scour the ground for people who also did X, Y and Z and failed, you've said exactly nothing interesting.

In particular, you have not increased the posterior plausibility of the claim "people who do X, Y and Z are more likely to be successful" more than a tiny little increment.

I say this as a successful businessperson who has worked for a number of failed startups and knows a fair number of people who came within one business decision of "success" (defined as being a millionaire with less than five years of work).

These studies of only successful business-people are completely vacuous. It isn't enough to show that "People who were successful did X, Y and Z." You must also show "People who did X, Y and Z had a better chance of success", which is a completely unrelated question, and whose answer can only be ascertained by investigating a reasonably large sample of people selected on the basis of doing X, Y and Z, not on the basis of being successful.