In a thread about survivor bias, and you fall for the same trap. How many people coming from wealthy background end up failing?
Take Bill Gates, his father cofounded a law firm, and his mother was a board members of several firms. That is a very wealthy background, but not outrageously so. How many people of the same level of wealth became successful businesspeople? It's said that his mom being on the same board as IBM's CEO at the time was a more instrumental factor to his eventual success than his family's wealth, and his own effort of course.
> It's said that his mom being on the same board as IBM's CEO at the time was a more instrumental factor to his eventual success than his family's wealth, and his own effort of course.
This sounds a lot like "his family's wealth was a more instrumental factor than his family's wealth" since "being on a board" is pretty rarified air. It's not Gates-himself-level wealthy, but what percentile is that? 90th? 95th? 99th?
When IBM came knocking, Bill Gates referred them to Gary Kildall. Kildall (for whatever reason) muffed the deal, and Gates didn't pass on that opportunity again. Gary had the opportunity, and came from a middle class company. He invested in his company with his own resources.
Gates received $5000 from his family for his business.
I've read accounts of Microsoft's early days. It was self-sustaining very quickly.
I also know something about compilers and interpreters. BASIC of that era was simply not difficult to create. Yes, Gates & Allen had access to a PDP-10 at Harvard which helped. But it was not required, as Woz proved by writing Apple BASIC in a notebook and hand assembled it.
I also know that Hal Finney wrote a BASIC in 1978 or so that fit in a 2K EPROM (for Intellivision). As I recall, it didn't take him very long.
So no, Microsoft is simply not a result of massive infusions of money. An awful lot of people had the ability to create Microsoft, what they lacked was vision, drive, and willingness to risk.
And no, Gates and Allen were not going to starve if they failed, even without their parents' money.
Not the OP, but I can name many: Andy Grove (Intel) , Steve Jobs (Apple), Larry Page, Sergei Brin (Google), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Michael Dell (Dell).
They all seem to come from solidly middle or upper middle class, so no poverty but not different than many of us on HN.
The argument was not that you had to be rich, just that you had a safety net so you could take risks and know you had a fallback without being homeless and hungry.
But the Google cofounders specifically both had parents who were early computer scientists or mathematicians
In all fairness, I haven’t been consistent between “coming from enough money that your parents can be your angel investors” and “you can afford to fail and call your parents for help with the rent”.
Your question is naming just one not coming from money. None of the people I listed did.
Wealthy background surely helps immensely, but other factors such as environment are vital as well. Google founders met at Stanford, in the heart of Silicon Valley, at the height of the dotcom era. That’s more important than their background.
Being wealthy is not the most important factor to one’s success. 50% of US population is middle class. Even if those I listed were all upper middle class, that would still be perhaps 5% of US population, or millions of people. Yet only a few rise to the top.
While not a tech company founder, Oprah Winfrey created a media empire. She was born to a teenage mother in rural Mississippi (and poverty).
If someone wants a story about overcoming one's lot in life through grit, hard work and making the most of situations/opportunities her story is one you'll want; maybe not as relatable as the Bezos, Dell, Jobs, Musk etc but a story that poverty->billionaire entrepreneur can happen. There is also a reason she is the only one I can think of that fits description.
Jensen Hung’s father was an engineer and his mother was a teacher. He wasn’t going to be homeless and on the street if he failed.
And he didn’t come straight out college either. He worked at AMD and I’m sure he had established some type of financial foundation and I’m sure he could have easily found a job if Nvidia failed with his background.
>>Jensen Hung’s father was an engineer and his mother was a teacher. He wasn’t going to be homeless and on the street if he failed.
So now the goalposts are "isn't desperate" while a while ago it was "came from money". Having caring parents and being raised in culture that value education help. No one is arguing that.
>>And he didn’t come straight out college either. He worked at AMD and I’m sure he had established some type of financial foundation and I’m sure he could have easily found a job if Nvidia failed with his background.
He needed to get a job first like a average person before starting his own company. Privilege!
Huang's family must have had interesting connections if you consider that the daughter of his cousin is running AMD. And both were born in Taiwan and then went to MIT, which seems unlikely to happen without family money.
When you like something, it's engaging and informative. When you don't, well, call it propaganda. I suppose anything is propaganda, since nothing is pure facts.
I'd rather have a sourced analysis of something I don't like than read a dude writing an unsourced cheering post celebrating how powerful my army is.
Propaganda can be done by both your enemies and your own side, and the later is the most dangerous one. The more you like it, the more skeptical you should be.
Everything is propaganda. Even your and mine comments are propaganda. Because propaganda can also be called marketing. And every text is marketing of ones own opinion.
You tend to distrust the propaganda of the other side. You are not quite as distrustful of the propaganda of your own side. If it is clever enough not to appear as a cheerleader like this article, you may barely notice it cherrypicking the benefits of a story.
Obligatory: "Are we the baddies?"-sketch illustrates the concept very nicely.
The two launches scheduled for today (Nov. 14th 2025) are both on the East coast and are scheduled to be within an hour (22:08 EST and 22:55 EST according to Spaceflight Now) from: Launch Complex 39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, and SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
If those launches go on schedule, that will mean 4 launches (New Glenn, Atlas 5, and two Falcon 9s) in 31 hours from the Cape Canaveral area in Florida.
So you are saying everyone who wants to share a document has to either have their own server, or log in to a server hosted by someone else?
What if that host goes down when the user needs it most, who is responsible for that? Who is doing backup or recovery? What if there is a security breach and users lost data? because Internet access is a must if the server is shared among "dozens of users".
If $10/month is insane, how much should it cost and why?
Right, because Amazon and Microsoft never go down… Look, you had some good points, even if arguable, but the whole downtime bogeyman is just pure cloud provider marketing to drum up FUD. You might be surprised to know that many cloud providers, even the big popular ones, don’t handle backups for you.
Well I spend about $5/month over the lifetime of a setup that could support like fifty users. So that's like ten cents a month. Maybe add a healthy Big Tech size profit margin, charge 50 cents a seat a month?
Anecdotal, but I feel like I've done a better job curating diverse opinions in my feed than any algorithm has.
Surely an algorithm focused on that would best me, but the only ones out there today are only motivated by selling ad space and data. Its a bit of an unfair fight today since that isn't my goal, but I don't expect anyone to fund a social media platform with similar goals to mine in their algorithm.
There is much more diversity of perspective among friends and colleagues than there is in my algorithmic social media feed. This is the whole problem: we no longer see perspectives we respect but don't share.
Email are inundated with spams, but it's still a helpful tool. We don't stop using email because of spam. Good things happen because of email communication everyday.
