One supporting example for the article's position is Mint.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791278 (How Mint beat Wesabe from Mint's point of view)

> We spent a ton of time holding online chats, went to events (like twiistup la, finnovate) and connected with the entire personal finance community. Oh yea, this was 9 months before we even launched the product.

Think about this. By the time Mint launched we had more traffic than all the other personal finance sites (buxfer, geezeo, wesabe) combined.

That's exactly right. Ideas aren't worth much. I like Siver's article on ideas as multipliers. Execution and the 'business side of things' as you stated are what matters. If Zuckerberg didn't execute like he did with Facebook, Facebook would've still have been a cute little toy project at Harvard. The idea of Facebook itself is pretty simplistic.

He was also lucky, in the right place and time, and savvy enough to exploit his luck. Plus, the value of Facebook (and other sites mentioned) is the community and mindshare. You can't just buy a Facebook clone and expect overnight success.

This attitude bugs me a lot. There is probably a path for every single person in this country to make a million dollars in the next year if they were just "savvy enough" to take advantage of it. It seems everyone wants to diminish Zuck's success by ascribing luck to it, but let me tell you something. Zuck executed the shit out of Facebook. Did the community and mindshare just come out of thin air?

There's no good reason to believe that Zuckerberg is lucky at all. Saying he was in the right place at the right time has this tacit assumption that if he were somewhere else at the wrong time he would have tried the same thing and fell flat on his face.

It seems because Facebook is an outlier, people feel safe talking about the luck factor, but that's meaningless because we all exist with individual circumstances, and by that measure everything every one of us does is based on luck. Instead, I prefer to ascribe luck to things that the individual actually had no control over, such as winning the lottery.

+1. I once wrote an article on why the idea of luck pissed me off too. You succinctly described my own thoughts better than I did. Thanks for writing this.

The time when it was possible to build simple application with good design and get tons of users is over. Today, a lot of people can do what the pioneers have done and get 0 users. I don't say it's impossible to get so many users as FB, but it's much harder. So Zuck was lucky to have the right solution in the right time. The bar for Zuck of today is much higher, simply because they aren't so "lucky" to live in the wild beginning of computer/ internet era.

I'm not saying his success was due purely to luck, but that luck was a major factor.

Being the right place and right time is a huge part of it. He was the right age, in the right environment, when the right technology reached the right tipping point and critical mass.

I'm not disparaging Zuckerberg's ability or hard work. However many with greater ability and who have worked harder have failed because of circumstances beyond their control.

But isn't it just a platitude you tell yourself to feel better that you will never be that successful? How can you be sure Zuck isn't better than those who failed? And how can you be sure those who failed didn't do something wrong? You see how pointless this is?

Luck plays a role in building a billion dollars company, otherwise billg, stevej, would be building billion dollars company every 10 years which is not happening.

Building a million dollars company is hard work (I mean 10 million at least ), but still billion dollars company are mostly about being lucky and exploiting it. I doubt that billionnaire entrepreneurs seriously worked much more, or much smarter than millionnaires. Billionaire companies landed there because they exploited ideas inherently more monopolistic, more able to spread.

If you take the sivers multiplier http://sivers.org/multiply, ideas still have some potential : a x20 multiplier is a huge boost.

sigh thank you for totally missing the point. This is all mental masturbation. You're just using luck as a synonym for circumstance, which is not a good attitude for an aspiring entrepreneur to take.

> There is probably a path for every single person in this country to make a million dollars in the next year if they were just "savvy enough" to take advantage of it.

Yes, there is, in the literally uncountable possible paths that the decisions of every other person on the planet (not to mention the state of the planet itself) create, there probably does exist a path to success, if not all, at least most people. Some of those paths involve crime, deceit, coercion and such but that is irrelevant.

"Luck" is you making the right choices (naturally based on your genes, psychology and the decisions that have led you to your current self), others making choices that facilitate it and the planet not blowing up in this process.

You realize the statements you've quoted are a 3-sentence tangent that has nothing to do with the point of the article, right? There's another 1500+ words that don't rely on this being true or not.

Secondly, I didn't say technical expertise is worth "nothing." Of course it's worth something. But as developers, we need to realize that, except in rare exceptions, our code is worth a lot less than we think it is.

That's great article you have written and I personally really liked it. I will even take some ideas from it. I think you shouldn't pay to much attention to people who take everything as personal insult and fail to see behind their personal world.