

Making money takes practice like playing the piano takes practice - iisbum
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1985-making-money-takes-practice-like-playing-the-piano-takes-practice

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mattjung
Making money definitely doesn't take the same amount of practice as piano
playing. You won't find a single world-class piano player who started playing
when he was 20 years old. But you will find many successful entrepreneurs that
started to get interest in making money in their twenties or even later. The
main reason is that luck alone can make you rich, but will never transform you
into a good piano player. It may help you in creating a business if money is
your primary interest (e.g. Friedrich Flick), but it will even help you more
when you do something that's fun (e.g. Steve Jobs).

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Andys
Maybe this is because sitting around practicing a piano for 8 hours a day is
acceptable for 6 to 18 year olds but no 20+ year old is able to do this.

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hyperbovine
Almost nobody practices 8 hours a day, even among world class musicians.
(Liszt and his cadre were some notable exceptions.) If you believe Gladwell
averaging three a day from ages 10-20 is enough to make a prodigy.

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Timothee
I asked the same thing on the blog, but would be interested to know what the
HN community thinks.

Jason and other speakers at Startup School (like Paul Buchheit for example)
talked about how they were already building and selling things to their
friends growing up.

I did none of that and I was wondering if that's something that's part of
one's character, or if that's something that can come later.

Also, I'm thinking one's environment (parents in particular) might influence
you in that direction.

I sometimes feel that I grew up in a well-enough family that I didn't need to
work for pocket money, but not entrepreneurial enough that I would be
inspired. But it might just be my character then…

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pchristensen
I had some entrepreneurial drive as a kid (selling origami, candy arbitrage,
etc) but got in trouble and unfortunately the "Don't fight the system" message
was louder than the entrepreneurial urge. I still worked hard mowing lawns,
summer jobs, etc. What was missing was the idea that I could create
arbitrarily large amounts of value for it and charge accordingly.

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ellyagg
Ahh, candy arbitrage. That was a great opportunity when I was a HS freshman. I
had resellers and contracts and everything...until the stupid administration
called me into the office.

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sdh
I think this is a big part of why so many VC funded "we'll figure out how to
make money later" startups fail. The runway encourages a weakness in the DNA
of their company. If primitive man had a refrigerator full of food back at the
cave, he would never have learned to hunt.

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charlesju
As a bootstrapped company I understand what you mean, but that doesn't mean
companies like that cannot succeed. ie. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Digg, etc.

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ryanwaggoner
According to Zuckerberg, Facebook already had thousands or hundreds of
thousands of users when they took funding, and they were funding growth with
ad revenue.

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grinich
From what I've heard, they took funding primarily to build the photos app,
which ended up being FB's killer feature over other social networking sites at
the time.

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tomerico
So, on one hand, you wouldn't know how to make money before you gained
experiance selling stuff, and the more experiance the better. On the other
hand, you should gain experiannce by bootstrapping and putting your money at
risk, instead of the investors?

Am I the only one this doesn't make sense to?

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mechanical_fish
The whole point of bootstrapping is that you risk almost nothing before you
have some positive feedback that suggests you can risk more. You bet a nickel
that you can sell something for a dime. Then you bet a dime that you can sell
something for a quarter. Repeat until you're Bill Gates and you're betting a
football team that you can make a lot of money leasing the Eiffel Tower.

If you lose at any point, you can take comfort in the fact that you haven't
lost more than you know how to make.

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patio11
I was never in the hole more than $60 plus my own time. Seriously, some days I
think being a computer programmer is too darn easy to be legal. We bang away
on a keyboard, whammo, value ex nihilo.

