Comment by torginus
2 days ago
It boggles the mind that this kind of management is what it takes to create one of the most valuable companies in the world (and becoming one of the world's richest in the process).
2 days ago
It boggles the mind that this kind of management is what it takes to create one of the most valuable companies in the world (and becoming one of the world's richest in the process).
It's a cliche but people really underestimate and try to downplay the role of luck[0].
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-...
Luck. And capturing strong network effect.
The ascents of the era all feel like examples of anti-markets, of having gotten yourself into an intermediary position where you control both side's access.
People also underestimate the value of maximizing opportunities for luck. If we think of luck as random external chance that we can't control, then what can we control? Doing things that increase your exposure to opportunities without spreading yourself too thin is the key. Easier said than done to strike that balance, but getting out there and trying a lot of things is a viable strategy even if only a few of them pay off. The trick is deciding how long to stick with something that doesn't appear to be working out.
Sure helps to be born wealthy, go to private school, and Ivy League college.
Success happens when luck meets hard work.
And timing
Ability vastly increases your luck surface area. A single poker hand has a lot of luck, and even a game, but over long periods, ability starts to strongly differentiate peoples' results.
Win a monster pot and you can play a lot of more interesting hands.
Except you can play hundreds of thousands of poker hands in your lifetime, but only have time/energy/money to start a handful of businesses.
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This might be true for a normal definition of success, but not lottery-winner style success like Facebook. If you look at Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Google, and so on, the founders all have few or zero previous attempts at starting a business. My theory is that this leads them to pursue risky behavior that more experienced leaders wouldn't try, and because they were in the right place at the right time, that earned them the largest rewards.
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What "massive string of failed attempts" did Zuckerberg or Bezos ever accumulate?
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This is just cope for people with a massive string of failed attempts and no successes.
Daddy's giving you another $50,000 because he loves you, not because he expects your seventh business (blockchain for yoga studio class bookings) is going to go any better than the last six.
IMO this strengthens the case for luck. If the probability of winning the lottery is P, then trying N times gives you a probability of 1-(1-P)^N.
Who's more likely to win, someone with one lottery ticket or someone with a hundred?
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
Some will read this and laser in on the "socialism" part, but obviously the interesting bit is the second half of the quote.
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this is also just cope
Every billionaire could have died from childhood cancer.
Past a certain point, skill doesn't contribute to the magnitude of success and it becomes all luck. There are plenty of smart people on earth, but there can only be 1 founder of facebook.
Plenty of smart people prefer not to try their luck, though. A smart but risk-avoidant person will never be the one to create Facebook either.
Plenty of them do try and fail, and then one succeeds, and it doesn't mean that person is intrinsically smarter/wiser/better/etc than the others.
There are far, far more external factors on a business's success than internal ones, especially early on.
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What risk was there in creating facebook? I don't see it.
Dude makes a website in his dorm room and I guess eventually accepts free money he is not obligated to pay back.
What risk?
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I view success as the product of three factors, luck, skill and hard work.
If any of these is 0, you fail, regardless of how high the other two are. Extraordinary success needs all three to be extremely high.
There is another dimension, which is mostly but not fully characterized as perseverance, but many times with an added dose of ruthlessness
Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, google and many others all had strong doses of ruthlessness
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Or you can just have rich parents and do nothing, and still be considered successful. What you say only applies to people who start from zero, and even then I'd call luck the dominant factor (based on observing my skillful and hardworking but not really successful friends).
>luck, skill and hard work.
Another key component is knowing the right people or the network you're in. I've known a few people that lacked 2 of those 3 things and yet somehow succeeded. Simply because of the people they knew.
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You should read Careless People if this boggles your mind.
youre thinking of ordinary people by john lennon
I'm thinking of exactly what I said[^1] :)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
Giving 1.5 million salary is nothing for these people.
It shouldn’t be mind boggling. They see revolutionary technology that has potential to change the world and is changing the world already. Making a gamble like that is worth it because losing is trivial compared to the upside of success.
You are where you are and not where they are because your mind is boggled by winning strategies that are designed to arrive at success through losing and dancing around the risk of losing.
Obviously mark is where he is also because of luck. But he’s not an idiot and clearly it’s not all luck.
But how is it worth for meta, since they won't really monetize it.
At least the others can kinda bundle it as a service.
After spending tens of billions in AI how has it impacted a single dollar on meta's revenue?
The not-so-secret is that the "killer apps" for deep neural networks are not LLMs or diffusion models. Those are very useful, but the most valuable applications in this space are content recommendation and ad targeting. It's obvious how Meta can use those things.
The genAI stuff is likely part talent play (bring in good people with the hot field and they'll help with the boring one), part R&D play (innovations in genAI are frequently applicable to ad targeting), and part moonshot (if it really does pan out in the way boosters seem to think, monetization won't really be a problem).
>But how is it worth for meta, since they won't really monetize it.
Meta needs growth as there main platform is slowing down. To move forward they need to gamble on potential growth. VR was a gamble. They bombed that one. This is another gamble.
They're not stupid. Like all the risks you're aware of, they're also aware of. They were aware of the risks for VR too. They need to find a new high growth niche. Gambling on something with even a 40% chance of exploding into success is a good bet for them given there massive resources.
Isn't Meta doing some limited rollout of Llama as an API? Still I haven't got my hands on it so I cannot say for sure whether it is currently paid or not, but that can drive some revenue.
When you start to think about who exactly determines what makes a valuable company, and if you believe in the buffalo herd theory, then it makes a little bit of sense.
It all makes much more sense when you start to realize that capitalism is a casino in which the already rich have a lot more chips to bet and meritocracy is a comforting lie.
> meritocracy is a comforting lie.
Meritocracy used to be a dirty word, before my time, of course, but for different reasons than you may think. Think about the racial quotas in college admissions and you’ll maybe see why the powers that be didn’t want merit to be a determining factor at that time.
Now that the status quo is in charge of college admissions, we don’t need those quotas generally, and yet meritocracy still can’t save us. The problem of merit is that we rarely need the best person for a given job, and those with means can be groomed their entire life to do that job, if it’s profitable enough. Work shouldn’t be charity either, as work needs to get done, after all, and it’s called work instead of charity or slavery for good reasons, but being too good at your job at your current pay rate can make you unpromotable, which is a trap just as hard to see as the trap of meritocracy.
Meritocracy is ego-stroking writ large if you get picked, just so we can remind you that you’re just the best one for our job that applied, and we can replace you at any time, likely for less money.
The answer is fairly straightforward. It's fraud, and lots of it.
A honest businessman wouldn't put their company into a stock bubble like this. Zuckerberg runs his mouth and tells investors what they want to hear, even if it's unbacked.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this valuable because so much of the value is derived from ad-fraud that Facebook is both party to and knows about.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this big because it's growth relied extensively on crushing all competition through predatory pricing, illegal both within the US and internationally as "dumping".
Bear in mind that these are all bad as they're unsustainable. The AI bubble will burst and seriously harm Meta. They would have to fall back on the social media products they've been filling up with AI slop. If it takes too long for the bubble to burst, if zuckerberg gets too much time to shit up Facebook, too much time for advertisers to wisen up to how many of their impressions are bots, they might collapse entirely.
The rest of Big Tech is not much better. Microsoft and Google's CEOs are fools who run their mouth. OpenAI's new "CEO of apps" is Facebook's pivot-to-video ghoul.
As I've said in other comments - expecting honesty and ethical behavior from Mark Zuckerberg is a fool's errand at best. He has unchecked power and cannot be voted out by shareholders.
He will say whatever he wants and because the returns have been pretty decent so far, people will just take his word for it. There's not enough class A shares to actually force his hand to do anything he doesn't want to do.
Zuckerberg started as a sex pest and got not an iota better.
But we could, as a society, stop rewarding him for this shit. He'd be an irrelevant fool if we had appropriate regulations around the most severe of his misdeeds.
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What is a good resource to read about the ad fraud? This is the first I'm hearing of that.
I used to work in adtech. I don't have any direct information but, I assume this relates to the persistent rumours that Facebook inflates impressions and turns a blind eye to bot activity.
Ha ha.
You used “honest” and “businessman” in the same sentence.
Good one.
I'll differ from the siblingposters who compare it to the luck of the draw, essentially explaining this away as the excusable randomness of confusion rather than the insidious evil of stupidity; while the "it's fraud" perspective presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about.
Instead, think of whales for a sec. Think elephants - remember those? Think of Pando the tree, the largest organism alive. Then compare with one of the most valuable companies in the world. To a regular person's senses, the latter is a vaster and more complex entity than any tree or whale or elephant.
Gee, what makes it grow so big though? The power of human ambition?
And here's where I say, no, it needs to be this big, because at smaller scales it would be too dumb to exist.
To you and me it may all look like the fuckup of some Leadership or Management, a convenient concept beca corresponding to a mental image of a human or group of humans. That's some sort of default framing, such as can only be provided to boggle the mind; considering that they'll keep doing this and probably have for longer than I've been around. The entire Internet is laughing at Zuckerberg for not looking like their idea of "a person" but he's not the one with the impostor syndrome.
For ours are human minds, optimized to view things in term of person-terms and Dunbar-counts; even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped. But last time I checked my hand wasn't shaped anything like the invisible network of cause and effect that the metaphor represents; instead I would posit that for an entity like Facebook, to perform an action that does not look completely ridiculous from the viewpoint of an individual observer, is the equivalent an anatomical impossibility. It did evolve after all from American college students
See also: "Beyond Power / Knowledge", Graeber 2006.
why is there so much of this on HN? I'm on a few social networks, but this is the only one where I find this kind of quasi-spiritual, stream of consciousness, word length steadily increasing, pseudo-technical, word salad diatribes?
It's very unique to this site and these type of comments all have an eerily similar vibe.
This is pretty common on HN but not unique to it. Lots of rationalist adjacent content (like stuff on LessWrong, replies to Scott Alexander's substack, etc) has it also. Here I think it comes from users that try to intellectualize their not-very-intellectual, stream of consciousness style thoughts, as if using technical jargon to convey your feelings makes them more rational and less emotional.
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Between “presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about,” before going on and sharing an opinion on that subject, and “even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped,” I think it may just be AI slop.
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>why is there so much of this on HN?
Where?
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