Reading 10: King of the Ball
When I took the class “Building a High Tech Startup” junior year, one of my big takeaways (along with the fact that I do not want to build a high tech startup) was that the two most important parts of making a successful startup was building a good team and just sheer dumb luck. It was our instructor’s opinion that while every company is so subject to the whims of the market that there was no way to ever guarantee success, it was “unforgivable” if your company failed because of a foolish mistake like surrounding yourself with the wrong people.
I think it’s interesting to think about this in relation to Linux’s story, because although it’s clear that it was a success, it’s interesting to observe the balance of “luck” and “a good team.” On the one hand, Linus didn’t exactly build a team to help him with Linux, he just did most of the heavy lifting on his own and then sent it out into the world to be used and worked on by anyone who wanted to take a crack at it. The idea of applying “luck” to this story is also a little strange, because it’s hard to say where it really fits in. Is it “luck” that Linus wanted to make a terminal emulator program and that it just morphed into Linux? Is it “luck” that he was able to build this project into something so pervasively useful and interesting? I guess you could say that it’s lucky that it grew to become so popular, but maybe that’s just because Linus put in the work to make it good enough for so many people to want and use. Maybe the luck goes all the way back into Linus’s childhood, where he was fortunate enough to have access to a computer and someone to show him the basics of coding.
Maybe I shouldn’t be trying to apply startup logic to Linux, because maybe it isn’t a conventional startup. There was no hiring done, no rounds of fundraising or IPO. This was just a guy who built something he thought was cool sharing it the world so that we could all see how cool it was too. I think the story of Linux is definitely proof of the potential of hackers in the bazaar. This is obviously a success story about how an open source project can grow into something truly amazing. However, when I look at something like Linux, I have to wonder whether there are other, equally interesting, useful, or world-changing projects that might be out there in the abyss that never got picked up by the broader community. Maybe there aren’t any. Maybe, between the hackers in the bazaar and the law of averages, projects become as widespread as they deserve to be. Maybe luck has nothing to do with it, and maybe Linux has been so successful because it deserves to be. But luck does have something to do with it, and maybe there’s some unlucky project out there, waiting for its turn in the limelight. And maybe one day we’ll get to see it, and it will be just as successful as Linux. Or maybe not. We’ll just have to see.
