Comment by slurgfest

They didn't get rich programming, not at all. They got rich owning successful companies. The fact that they did some of the programming for some MVP or other is almost incidental. They were not getting paid huge salaries for cranking out code and they certainly weren't the only ones involved. If you can pay someone to do the same kind of work on an MVP and then you win the same kind of lottery, it is not necessary for you to have any direct programming input.