That's what I'm trying (and apparently failing) to get at:
For Twitch, being gamers who also ran a video streaming site was a huge unfair advantage, because they were in a position to recognize a trend as it just started. There was no reason, if you look at statistics or data, to believe that this was a combination worth a billion dollars - that moment had never happened before in the history of business, and will probably never happen again. There was a lot of reason, if you look at personal experience of them and their early customers, to believe it would be.
Similarly, Mark Zuckerburg was a college sophomore at an elite institution who had also built a machine-learning music player. He had a huge unfair advantage, because he realized what he could do with the personal data of a few thousand students. I was also a college student at the same time, at an elite college, and was (as a volunteer) involved with writing our own campus social network. It never occurred to me that it could be a business, let alone a $300B one, because at the time I thought that software companies were things that sold high-performance databases to Fortune 500 companies for real money.
What other unfair advantages do Hacker News readers have that they don't realize are advantages?
For Twitch, being gamers who also ran a video streaming site was a huge unfair advantage, because they were in a position to recognize a trend as it just started. There was no reason, if you look at statistics or data, to believe that this was a combination worth a billion dollars - that moment had never happened before in the history of business, and will probably never happen again. There was a lot of reason, if you look at personal experience of them and their early customers, to believe it would be.
Similarly, Mark Zuckerburg was a college sophomore at an elite institution who had also built a machine-learning music player. He had a huge unfair advantage, because he realized what he could do with the personal data of a few thousand students. I was also a college student at the same time, at an elite college, and was (as a volunteer) involved with writing our own campus social network. It never occurred to me that it could be a business, let alone a $300B one, because at the time I thought that software companies were things that sold high-performance databases to Fortune 500 companies for real money.
What other unfair advantages do Hacker News readers have that they don't realize are advantages?