
Black Swan Farming - joeyespo
http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html
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astrofinch
This doesn't seem quite right to me. Yes, if you're going to succeed big, it
helps to have a startup idea that everyone else thinks is bad. But this seems
like only one of many factors that goes in to succeeding big. I'm inclined to
agree with Jared Diamond: "We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of
success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding
many separate possible causes of failure."

I'm not an expert on any of Facebook, Dropbox, or Airbnb, but I've heard about
competitors for all of them, including some rather early-seeming competitors.
Was being first-to-market really the single, crucial factor in the success of
all three? Or is there some other advantage, not related to being first-to-
market, that having a crazy-seeming idea brings that I'm missing?

Additionally, Paul doesn't mention another way to be first-to-market: Come up
with something so original that few others have thought of it. This could be
another way to avoid competition, right? It's not obvious to me that wildly
original ideas will always seem bad.

My take: Reality is a complicated place and reliable generalizations are few
and far between :)

I don't think we can say much about what it takes to be a big success because
there's so little data.

------
pella
see: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497461>

