The tech gold rush--luck and being first.zt

The tech gold rush offers about the same odds as the Yukon and California gold rushes in the 19th century. 100,000 strivers with little knowledge of what they were getting into headed out to grab some of that gold, and a mere handful found enough gold and kept enough of it to live large in San Francisco or back east.

The advantage of the tech gold rush is it's a lot easier, cleaner and safer to sleep on a sofa in San Francisco and code your dreams on a laptop than it was to clamber up mountains, dig the ore out of hard rock with a pick and avoid getting shot in the back if you did strike a vein of gold.

The problem with finding gold is that much of the process boils down to luck and being first. Those who stumbled on the easy wealth could write an account of how they located the gold, but the account would not be as useful to those coming after as we might imagine, due to survivorship bias, a topic I've covered several times: The Unknown Unknowns and Survivor Bias (June 15, 2013)

Why Advice From Highly Successful People Is Misleading (and thus potentially harmful) (December 23, 2013)