You’re 30, you have your whole life ahead of you and you greatest achievements are likely going to come from work you haven’t even thought of yet.
Identify what you truly enjoy, people you like to be with and set goals you want to aspire to. Make sure you spend your next 10 years focused on those things.
1. Misunderstands the 1st rule of breakthrough consumer internet companies. The challenge is always getting users and almost never monetizing a loyal user base. This happened with Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Facebook...strange that people still bring up this argument.
With a flip of a switch the Instagram team could put a banner ad and make >$10M/year but they decided to pursue a more native business model that will take time.
2. Myspace didn't fail because of some inherent problem with their model, they failed because their team was unable to compete with Facebook.
It's true that Instagram could suffer a Myspace fate but the data so far suggests they're more like the Facebook of their space then the Myspace.
3. This is the worst point. Every startup has a random success multiplier but Instagram was big enough that the high order bit was their hardwork (persistence) and talent.
I highly encourage you to matriculate to Uchicago, you will learn and grow more in your 1st year at college than coming to Silicon Valley straight out of high school. There's no rush.
With that said, it might be a great experience to come out to SV this summer before you start college.
They didn't plan on building games for android and iOS.
I remember them for being a 100% flash-site that offered a mediocre tetris-clone until they were sued by the tetris-copyright-holders.
"Draw Something" was an extremely fortunate product: a) they finally had a hugely popular game which took everyone by surprise and b) they made so much money that Zynga decided to just buy them instead of spending weeks/months on copying them and losing money every day they didn't have an alternative to "Draw Something"
Many successes are based around 'luck' - or more accurately capitalising on it when it comes your way. I know my business has continuously evolved over the years and people have often used the term 'lucky' for me. I find it irritating when people say that someones success is purely down to luck - I'm sure that there were a lot of decisions that were made that contributed to their success here, as that's what it is
sorry for not being clear: not the people running OMGPOP were lucky, the investors were, they just couldn't have known how things turned out to be.
When they invested in the initial round my guess is that the idea behind the startup and the business ideas were completely different from what the company represents now
OK, appreciate you coming back on it. I still think the same thing goes - the investors invest in people they believe are winners - whether its YC or Sequoia. Anyway, my take on it is that luck happens (both bad and good) and its what you do about it that counts. You can grab the good luck and run with it or you can fight back as hard as you can when bad luck strikes, or... you can take it and blame 'bad luck' for your failure
if you are an investor and you don't have a look at the team behind an ambitious and promising idea you will soon run out of money, this is nothing Yc-specific.
edit: ok, another try, people don't like the word "luck" so let's call it a hail mary pass :)
They iterated this drawing game several times in different formats and platforms. I would say it was more than blind luck. They had faith in their product and kept tuning an tweaking it.
You don't have to use Windows. The best way to protest is by using another product.
Claiming that you have the moral authority to pirate it is just wrong, doing so re-enforces the need for MSFT to have even stricter anti-piracy measures.
As soon as you start doing calculations like this to determine how many co-founders you should have it's almost a guaranteed you're not going to be successful.
Build something people want with people you love to work with. The rest will work itself out.
Identify what you truly enjoy, people you like to be with and set goals you want to aspire to. Make sure you spend your next 10 years focused on those things.