Quote:
Originally Posted by you&me
As the saying goes; "luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation"...
Bezo's parents being able to invest a couple hundred thousand into Amazon wasn't luck. It was an opportunity that he was able to take advantage of. And the fact that he was bright, with a solid idea surely also factored into their willingness to invest (that's the preparation).
Can anyone here honestly say the only thing standing between them and starting the next $100B company is their parent's ability to invest $300,000? Ha!
Whether you're talking about Jeff Bezos, or even just a partner at a law firm, pointing to their success and calling it 'luck' is disingenuous and shows a true lack of understanding of what it takes to achieve that level of success. No one claims an NHL'er is 'lucky' and it's much the same with anyone else at the pinnacle of their professional field.
Winning on your first pull on a slot machine is lucky; building a billion dollar business is almost anything but.
|
My dad and a friend of his literally had almost exactly the same idea as Jeff Bezos and about at the same time. Their book-selling site was very likely one of the very first on the internet that actually made a profit, although it was rather small and ultimately didn't last long.
It didn't last very long for multiple reasons, but a main one was that a couple of middle-aged nerds from Finland could not find financing, especially when Finland was going through a heavy depression.
On the other hand Jeff Bezos was an American and the VP of a hedge fund at 30, which helped him secure the funding he needed to run Amazon at a loss for years. I mean, it's not like Amazon was
actually built with just 300k. Jeff Bezos needed a hell of a lot more than than to turn Amazon into what it was, and most of that was other people's money.
The internet especially at the early years was extremely prone to producing monopolies, and it's 99.999999% luck to be one of the people who managed to cash in on that. I mean, there are only about half a dozen internet billionaires, and 100% of that generation of internet billionaires are white cishet males of roughly the same age from the United States with roughly the same background.
If Jeff Bezos couldn't have found financing for his extremely non-unique idea, we would have this exact same discussion with only the name changed. It was just a matter of timing.
There are probably millions of people just in America who are as smart and as hard workers as someone like Jeff Bezos. There were very likely at least hundreds of people who had roughly the same idea as Jeff Bezos at the same time. Yes Jeff Bezos certainly contributed to his personal success, but mostly it was still about being the right white cishet male with the right background at the right place and at the right time.