What's so interesting about success is the number of
failures who try to ride on your back. Shay Pierce is
just one of many...
since the guy specifically went out of his way not to "ride on his back" because of morals.
Frankly from his tweets it sure looks like the biggest failure on the team is the CEO...they just got lucky and instead of being humble, he is doing the completely wrong thing...and if he was such a failure as an employee, why did such a great manager keep him employed
Can't stress this enough. I liked OMGPOP from the start, when they were still that obscure flash-site for 6-12yr olds. But that was before the CEO announced that he's an asshole...
"DrawSomething" most likely got popular mainly because the implementation is much better than the other Pictionary clones (which have been around forever). And that's an aspect that Mr. CEO probably wasn't involved with at all, but rather his lowly developers.
The one thing that Mr. CEO could attribute to himself would be if he smelled the opportunity early and executed on it. But he didn't. It took them 3 years to port their most popular flash-game (then called "Draw my thing") to the cashcow mobile platform.
That doesn't seem like a calculated move to brag about, does it?
A professor of mine once said that becoming a professor requires equal parts intelligence, hard work and luck. Usually I cite him to stress the importance of luck: being talented and working hard often isn't enough. However when someone says that someone else just got lucky, I cite it to make another point: without talent and hard work, luck is often useless. You need vast amounts of luck to get somewhere if you're talentless and lazy. If you are talented and work hard, the tiniest amount of luck is enough to lift you from your peers.
According to me if a person is lazy and unproductive, even luck gives up on him.
You need to work hard anyway. And you need need luck on top of it. Things work in that order.
But a lot of people first expect to get lucky and then work hard. IMO that never happens, because the person tries to reverse cause-effect scenarios. The person expects reward before work, whereas rewards always come after work, never before it.
That's what unsuccessful people say when someone becomes successful.
I think there are two reasons for the typical "he just got lucky" insult.
1) When you tear down a successful person, you get to transfer a little of their success to you. (aka "player hatin'")
2) Level playing field. It's nice to imagine that everyone has the same amount of "luck," and therefore the same chance of being successful. It's disheartening to accept that some people might work harder or have more natural talent than you. Chalking it up to "luck" gives you hope that it could just as easily happen to you one day.
"Hope is the only thing stronger than fear" - Hunger Games
Btw, I think what the OMGPOP guy wrote on Twitter was mean and dumb. He shouldn't have written it. And I don't know these guys.
And I actually believe that most success is rooted in luck (or chance or circumstance). But everything I've read about OMGPOP says that they struggled for 6+ years and finally made it big with Draw Something.
"The harder I worked, the luckier I got." - Samuel Goldwyn
I agree with you. Hard work drastically improves your chances. But there are indeed times when people hit the silicon valley lottery. I suspect marc andreessen's secretary's peers were just as hard working as she was.
Maybe he is indeed an exceptional CEO. If you rank CEO's by quality, I suspect the top half of the list has better things to do than fumble around on twitter Saturday afternoon.
You are probably thinking of Jim Clark's exec admin, and I can say as someone who supported Jim Clark, that no, she worked about 10x harder and smarter than any admin you will likely meet. I Have a hundred anecdotes, but the one that comes to mind is where she had to delay his private jet, with an "electrical failure", just so we could deliver a ThinkPad the IT organization was repairing without him even knowing it was missing. She was still lucky, but based on the number of other admins JC went through, she was also unique in her ability and work ethic.
I don't know anything about Dan Porter. I have to admit my first thought reading this was that he's another 20-something CEO who hasn't developed the communication and political skills an good executive needs. But this guy is a seasoned executive (http://danporter.org/?page_id=4). Astounding.
Frankly from his tweets it sure looks like the biggest failure on the team is the CEO...they just got lucky and instead of being humble, he is doing the completely wrong thing...and if he was such a failure as an employee, why did such a great manager keep him employed