When I read about the success stories of famous tech company founders like Evan Spiegel, Mark Zuckerberg, Ben Pasternak...

When I read about the success stories of famous tech company founders like Evan Spiegel, Mark Zuckerberg, Ben Pasternak... it just all seem so ABC.
A: Get the idea
B: Make the idea
C: Millionaire/Billionaire
I dont expect them to tell the full story, but are tech companies that straight forward?
I see people everyday taking about their "cool idea for an app" but they will no doubt, never get even close to where Zuckerberg and Spiegel are.
Snapchat founder didn't even programme it himself, his friend was a developer and he designed the UI, and made the UX as slick as possible, other than that, it was just his idea.
Red pill me.

its incredibly hard and requires lots of luck too.

Luck I will agree with, but hard?
How?

the sneaky part they always leave out is funding . funding for marketing. funding for salaries funding for growth. w/o connections to venture capital ur dead in the water.

you can pivot just about any peace of shit into gold with enough funding.

the actual trick is convincing venture capital to plop down huge bucks for you and your team.
therefore it helps to have gone to harvard or some such shit. its just like applying to jobs.
ur applying for a boss to give you a paycheck for your made up job.

expect to do a lot of "dick sucking"

I've heard lack of funding is the fall from grace for a lot of startups.
I guess being able to get funding from VC's and Angels is a good skill to have as a founder then huh?

its the only "skill" to have, and the vc network is basically just a high school clique with plenty of hoops to jump thru so...

if you are coding code for the fun of the challenge and the intellectual insight, not the hope of becoming a lottery billionaire.

U need to come u with a product that is defensible, and resists aggressive attempts at competition. U need to get it to market before others, and it needs to be more than incrementally better than something else. You need to get thousands to tens of millions of users depending on your revenue structure. You need to pay people a lot, you need to write code that hasn't been designed before, you need to market it to users and capital, you need to have excellent excellent excellent reliability and usability, you need to have revenue (eventually), you cant just buy your way out of a problem etc etc. its not just "clock in, flip patty, clock out."

You have clearly never done this.

No, if I were to get an idea and decide to go for it, I'd probably pay someone to develop or "code" it. I know for a fact that if I outsource the work to a cheap indian freelancer, I'd get what I paid for, TRASH. But I cant shake the feeling that if I got a westerner to develop it, he would just steal the idea and do well with it, at least indians have their hands tied when it comes to actually running a company, but in the US, Canada, UK or EU (most parts), starting and running a company is a lot more likely, for anyone with a bit of determination and know how.
I agree with everything you said, thanks for the advice, you sound like you've done this before... if so do you mind telling me about your experiences? Are you technical or are you the business/"ideas" guy? Did you become successful? What exactly did you bring to the market? App? Website?
You sound like an interesting guy desu.

Thank you, I am just starting. Product is B2B software. Business side. But to learn more the best advice I would have is to read "Zero to One" by Peter Thiel. Probably the smartest entrepreneur alive and he really explains the common misconceptions people have about what makes a business successful.

Also, I havent had to deal with this yet, but a startup a friend of mine had ran into the probelm you described. This guy was old and he kept hiring these sketchy programmers on CRAIGSLIST. 1st guy tried to steal it, second fucked it up, third quit, now he's two years behind.

It's worth getting legal protection, and it's worth having a competent guy(s) do the work. Pay well or give equity works apparently. But be very careful with that. If it's a good enough idea, you can find funding to actually pay someone to do a good job.

Good luck man.

>i clearly haven't had my handing in the fouding of tech/internet business, banks, insurance companies and mergers and acquisitions.

"lel VC funding is all u need to be a successful profitable business" is classic advice from an M&A shill. You need to sell the dog shit to some stupid strategic before they realize that the company you founded on fundraising alone has no defensible profits (if profits at all).

This is why the tech bubble is a thing... snapchat IPO @20B with probably under 250M in profit.

>cant handle the truth about real world business and would rather have the world shaped to fit his beliefs thru online fairy tales and echo chambers

Thank you very much man, good luck with your gig. I've been playing around with 2 ideas and I opted to outsource one, and find a co-founder for the other, who I will hopefully, share equity with in exchange for his skillset in programming and developing.
Again, thanks.

and find a co-founder for the other, who I will hopefully, share equity with in exchange for his skillset in programming and developing.

> Getting a great idea
> Executing it
> Marketing it to humanity

2 and 3 are a real bitch.

>what even
Major VC funding is obviously indicative of potential and correlated with success but I challenge you to find one company that is built primarily on the raising of more and more money as a business model that
a) is public
b) has a positive 5 year return

The fact that stocks and corporate M&A decisions (in long run) are influenced more by organic earnings growth/contribution than a VC brand name is far from a fairy tale... especially after Theranos.

You forgot the >.
You sound like such a faggot, get the fuck out nobody wants you here, idiot.
Haha, I know theres a lot more that goes into it, I just watched the founders of vine talk about their experiences starting and getting vine to where it was before they sold to twitter and it sounded hectic.
He's trolling

hate 2 break ur little bubble but in the real world, if u dont get enough funding for your little idea, but its profitable, google or fb/ who has the money , will rip your idea off with way better funding and infrastructure, and pull out a similiar patent on that idea that they "filed 20 years ago"

>enough funding
Do you realize how easy it is to get funding?
Enough to pay for a few dev. interns?

Its not even remotely difficult, especially if you have willingness/access to credit, which you obviously would if your business was more than its capital structure.

>fairy tale babby thinks she can compete with a google off her grandmothers inheritance money and a few interns.

Evan Spiegel -> Stanford

Mark Zuckerberg -> Harvard

Ben Pasternak

seems like a hustler who has been learning to code since he was a baby. his mom/dad/both are probably developers

you need smart friends and you need to know what you're doing. all of these people had smart friends when they started

it's not easy, kiddo. spiegel was some rich jewboy with connections and had access to some of the brightest computer science students in the world at stanford when he started snapchat

>mad he got no equity
and my grandma is still balling at 85
kill urslef

...

>all of these people had smart friends when they started
also they were rich. it's a rigged system. rags to riches stories are nice tv movies and nothing else.

>you need smart friends and you need to know what you're doing. all of these people had smart friends when they started
If you're smart, you surround yourself with other smart people.

When anyone complains about having stupid or unintelligent friends, I can tell they are stupid themselves.

yes. just beg your dad to put you in a more prestigious prep school!!!!

For social media platforms and other easy-peasy ideas, it's literally just luck. There are start-ups that operate off some technical basis, but they aren't as yuge. Just think about all the brilliant people in SV and the world who have worked on projects that aren't shit yet totally failed.

I personally conceptualized Tumblr two years before it was ever founded, but I'm here sitting on ass rn replying to your thread.

Best not to idolize those who have achieved easy-money anyway, as it is akin to hitting the lottery. Just stop and ask yourself what you can do that is unique and not simply an angle from which to profit. Maybe that represents the bigger problem--there are too many people without truly grand ideas, and they only want to make money.

I went to a shitty high school, and a not so prestigious state university, but still made friends with a lot of people at the local elite universities.

You have to learn to network and stop blaming your parents. Plus, there are a lot of morons that go to good schools. It's less about the school, and more about how you take advantage of it.

You have no one to blame but yourself.

>but still made friends with a lot of people at the local elite universities.

you parents must be able to afford in a pretty nice area of town , so that you can just afford to hang out on various campuses hobnobbing with the future elites.

You have first and foremost your parents and their parents to blame.

you are not some super human genius baby fish out of water independant god child like u think u are. your surroundings, genes, fate , and randomness hand held you into exactly the life you are living right now.hate clowns like you patting themselves on the back for cashing in your lottery ticket.

Oh my God are you the most bitter person on Veeky Forums?

and them later gave him 200 million.

That's a popular misconception. Startups are becoming a "fashion trend" and every autist thinks they can "do a startup." The media, being as shitty as is, isn't helping.

Ideas are dime-a-dozen, the hard part is to actually execute them. A one sentence "make the idea" doesn't to it justice - most companies require years and years of growth / strategy / sales / business development. You don't just poof Facebook into existence, it required years of development, testing, marketing, etc.

i.e take a SaaS startup. you have a department in charge of product dev, a department for the design, a department for on-going marketing, etc. The 2 years of making the product as user-friendly as possible, and then 2 - forever years marketing it to even reach break-even (this is where companies fail. Their product is either bullshit with no market demand, or they don't know how to market it.) can't really be summed up into "make the idea."

Then we have this clown. Thinks he's all that because he made a toy car and stole aerospace knowledge from the Russians.