In what way did PG work hard? His job seems incredibly cushy to me. He even had the leisure to write his own lisp! VCs don’t work hard. They sit there and watch people grovel.
PG was lucky yes but also prepared to build web apps which nobody was doing at the time. He also had great co-founders/friends. Also the idea that a website could edit itself instead of having to be uploaded etc... And then they did it. So part of it was being there, part of it was building a technology/product that Yahoo needed etc... Part of it is working in computers as the web took off. Nobody at the time really knew what the web was going to be and I think we don't really know the full impact of the internet will be even today.
Take my story as an example. I worked in high school as a web form developer in 1995 and 1996. Lots of demand from professors to build their course websites with forms. I was just happy to have a summer job inside with AC. I had the technical chops to build an MVP of wufoo or surveymonkey etc.. But I didn't because I thought it was trivial and underestimated it. I thought at most I would sign up a few dozen psychology grad students or something. It wouldn't be a proper business etc...
Likewise, sometime in 2005-2007 I was in SF and couldn't get a cab and thought about a mobile app but discounted it as infeasible b/c I thought cities would never legalize it to preserve their taxi medallion scheme etc... That's probably true, they would have liked to do that but the public basically demanded it and Uber moved very fast. I reasoned incorrectly and underestimated the market.
I also underestimated DropBox, AirBnB, Hotmail, even Google, Yahoo and FB. The list goes on and on. Hind sight is 20:20 but I think it is important to figure out why I discounted these ideas at the time and what biases I had etc...
I think though that if you are actually interested in something though that goes a long ways to keeping you engaged. You can see past the discounting and the haters. If you continue to work on that, then by the time the rest of the world catches up, you are way ahead.
You don't even have to be some kind of Jedi who can see the future, if you just work on it because it is interesting. As you do that you will get glimpses as to what the future might look like.
Today, I actually don't think Dropbox is "just a sync or backup feature". It is so much more than that and that market has a lot of potential. GDrive, iCloud, and Microsoft all have big problems and limit themselves which hurts consumers.
