One of my beliefs about startups is that the jump from side project to business shouldn't even seem that hard. It definitely shouldn't seem "frighteningly ambitious". Look at the origin stories of the big 5:
GOOG: we've got a search engine that we did as an academic project. Lots of people are using it. Let's turn it into a business.
FACE: we've got a social network that lots of college kids are using. Let's turn it into a business.
AMAZ: let's sell books over the internet.
AAPL: Hmmm, my crazy genius friend Woz built an awesome "personal computer" in his spare time. Let's scale up production and sell it.
MSFT: Let's scale up our software development business and go after much bigger targets.
It just sounds unambitious because of the way you wrote it.
GOOG: Hey lets save the entire internet on our servers and be better than anyone else by magnitudes
FACE: I want to have everyone in the world to have a profile on facebook
AMAZ: I want every book in the world to be sold on my website, and pretty much everything else.
AAPL: I want to be better at product design than and become better than Microsoft
MSFT: I tricked IBM into doing distribution for us, but I want a PC in everyone's home within 10 years.
I think those come closer to the founders visions than what you wrote. Some of my versions actually include mindsets that their founders at the very beginning.
The OP's article actually talks about how your goal internally should be ambitious but outwardly only be something simple. So maybe the less ambitious goals were what they told people and the more ambitious goals are what they aimed for.
For example Paul Graham states you may be looking to replace email with a todo list like application. But all you really have to say is you're building a todo list application. He says this prevents investors from saying are we there yet and likely thinking you are a bit too ambitious.
I'm grateful that there is such a wide spectrum of how to interpret the ambition of these companies between yours and the parent post's comment. Thanks :)
HP: Me and my buddy can build anything electronic imaginable, relying largely on unfair advantages with vacuum tubes and slide rules. Limited only by what four hands can do in our backyard garage. Let's pick a creation that could be popular, and set up to produce and sell copies.
According to Mrs. Packard:
"Well, it was very scary to be leaving General Electric, and to realize that we were on our own. Actually, he [David] came back to get his engineer's degree, so really we were thinking of ourselves as students for the first year."
"During that year, he and Bill started Hewlett-Packard. At the end of his year's leave of absence was when he had to write a letter actually quitting General Electric. That was the most traumatic part of it all."
It does seem like some of that list is a lucky accident. what might the world look like if someone sat down and thought it through and did something ambitious on purpose? Woz and Bezos did it on purpose. Zuck and Google did it on accident. Microsoft seems somewhere in the middle.
Maybe the post needs some clarity so I might not fully understand, but I believe you're confusing the "I have an idea that seems obvious" step vs executing the "Let's start a company" step.
To me the growth ambitions distill into having both a technology well developed enough that it can be scaled to a receptive market, combined with committment to the market and to growing both of these elements in tandem.
Clearly survival bias, but I think the point stands: None of these necessarily started out as "Let's be crazy ambitious" but all had the kind of impact that Graham is looking for.
I believe Mark Zuckerberg (and the Winklevoss twins), Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates were all very ambitious people. I'm not sure about Brin and Page, but I guess they are as well. If they had not had the ambition and drive, the companies would have folded or sold instead of becoming huge.
Larry Page was incredibly ambitious even while he was a PhD student. He naively intended to work on 3 projects. Luckily he listened to the good advice of his advisor, Terry Winograd, who asked him to narrow his focus down to the web.
The quote below is excerpted from his 2009 commencement address [1].
"I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. There are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name."
I think this list is a good argument against survival bias.
Google had a fantastic product, which really worked. They tested on a small number of users and found it to be fantastic. They scaled that. There is a clear logical explanation for why they succeeded.
You could say "well, they may have failed at scaling". How hard is it to scale from where they already were, with such a good product? Not very hard, I'd say.
Let's assume your argument holds, and that many other groups had the same idea and didn't succeed. So they must have gotten at least as far as Google in getting their product done and tested by a decent sized group of users. So maybe 100s or 1000s of people were using their product on a daily basis. In which case, why don't we hear about those products?
I think you can treat survival bias seriously when there is a large element of luck involved. In the Google story, I don't see much luck. I see a really good idea that worked and was then brought to market.
> Lots of people think they have fantastic products.
Google didn't think they had a fantastic product. They _had_ one, it was pretty self-evident that the search engine was a great deal better than any competitor, and they had empirical evidence that many other people agreed (as they were using the engine).
> Lots of products take off without being fantastic.
I'm not sure that's true. I can't think of any examples of terrible products that have been hugely successful. I can think of examples of products that _became_ terrible after success or monopoly had been achieved.
> Lots of products can be really fantastic but never manage to take off.
It took me less than a minute using Google to see that it would conquer the world. Same for my colleagues. I think really you mean "good". _Fantastic_ products are by definition super-useful, popular, have instant appeal.
Survival bias would be saying these companies started easily so it's easy, ignoring the failures. However I don't think that was the posters point. The point was nearly all the big companies started trying something modest that grew more than a grand plan to take over the world.
> They are successful because the identified "objectives" and made the right calculations to those objectives.
This is pretty close to tautological. Your version of "right" can only be evaluated decades after the fact. Who succeeded? The ones who were right. Who's right? The ones who succeeded.
I also think it highly overvalues making the right calculations. All the calculation in the world will not avail you if you are not in the right position to make it happen. In human history, there have been about 100 billion people. How many of them, even given the right ideas, were placed to build a company like Apple or Google?
Even if we focus on ideas alone, making all the right calculations isn't sufficient. Somebody else could do that, too, and then it does come down to circumstance and luck.
It's certainly uncomfortable that life is hugely random. But I don't think the solution is to try to sweep that under the rug. If nothing else, that sort of aversion to risk keeps us from making good calculations about business.
You're offended because you think that people are discounting the very real brilliance and hard work behind these success stories. It's true that none of these folks would be where they are if they weren't smart and dedicated. But there are millions of smart, dedicated failures and mediocrities in the world. Brilliance and hard work are necessary but not sufficient, and the other ingredient is, yes, luck.
The made the right calculation with insufficient data, which means they were guessing. They guessed correctly and survived. Other guessed incorrectly and disappeared. I do not see a difference to a lottery.
Shuffling cards might not be a bad analogy, actually. There's a lot of skill involved in high-level poker play, but there's only so much you can do with a series of bad hands.
You don't think some amount of luck is involved? I believe most of your example successes had moments where they avoided failure only via outside factors they didn't predict, control, etc.
I don't feel like that's the case every time. Sometimes you make the right decision for the wrong reasons. Or your bad decisions, by way of luck, end up not hurting you.
Bill Gates, for example, initially declined IBM's approaches to build DOS for them. He declined, and referred them to Gary Kildall. IBM only came back to Gates because the deal with Kildall fell apart. There was no vision, skill, etc, in that sequence of events. Just luck. I imagine other highly successful people could point out similar stories in their past.
Gates likely would have been successful either way, but perhaps not to the same degree.
This is also basically how oil companies were started in the 19th century but it hasn't been possible to do it in that market for at least 80 years.
We might well have seen the last web/consumer tech behemoth that was 'started in a basement' too. The market is simply far too concentrated these days. The ability to quickly disrupt a behemoth certainly isn't a permanent state of affairs for our industry.
I think this mostly has to do with barriers to entry. 15 years ago it was orders of magnitude more difficult to launch a business online than it is today so there was far less competition. But it's important to remember that it was much more difficult.
If you look at it that way, there are always emerging areas that have little competition because they are so difficult. So if you had the ability to and were smart enough to create an innovative product in your basement, I think you absolutely could grow it into a behemoth.
Starting a computer company today would be very difficult and costly. Starting a computer company at a time very few people understood them or knew how to build them would be a lot more feasible if you were an expert (Woz).
Companies get disrupted by companies that are almost by definition starting in a seemingly completely different area.
GOOG: we've got a search engine that we did as an academic project. Lots of people are using it. Let's turn it into a business.
FACE: we've got a social network that lots of college kids are using. Let's turn it into a business.
AMAZ: let's sell books over the internet.
AAPL: Hmmm, my crazy genius friend Woz built an awesome "personal computer" in his spare time. Let's scale up production and sell it.
MSFT: Let's scale up our software development business and go after much bigger targets.