So young and so rich

In the field of innovative technology there are built-in riches and great opportunities to gain more riches. Not everyone can be a Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and become a billionaire by age 23, but many have been lucky enough to become self-made millionaires by age 25. The narratives of today’s top tech billionaires reveal this truism: all they need is one great idea, a lot of daring and the fortitude to bring your idea to beneficial completion.

Randall Lane’s book, You Only Have To Be Right Once: The Unprecedented Rise of the Instant Tech Billionaires, provides a definitive insider look at the “up-to-the-minute titans of tech” — who they are and what you can learn from their success stories. The tome not only examines the victorious ascent of these millennials, but also the setbacks that sometimes led to slumps and anxieties. Telling the narratives of the barely believable stories of 16 self-made techies — only one female among them — is both absorbing and stirring. The Y chromosome is obviously prevalent in this new breed of entrepreneurs. Essentially, they’re all men, and are digital natives. They grew up with new media, and are attuned to the workings of the Internet, smartphones and newfangled gadgets all their lives.

Steve Jobs characterized the older guard of tech entrepreneurs — with Bill Gates and Michael Dell completing the power triumvirate — who, two generations earlier, while themselves in their 20s, manifested the unsettling influence of technology. In Lane’s collection of recent successes however, the fundamental drivers increased their speed exponentially. You will be awed by their intensity and insistence, and their immense wealth, since at no time in history have such massive fortunes been so quickly acquired, let alone by “so young, and now so rich” people. Below are several key takeaways — culled from many interviews and research done by Forbes  — that can be generated from this engaging book.

• Monetary success is associated with being a teen hacker in the past. This is common to the people mentioned in the book, which is seen as a precise mirror image of the customary chauvinism currently prevailing in the technology environment today. Sometime in their respective young lives, they hacked, they experimented, they failed and they succeeded on their own or with some help from friends. More than having “daddy’s name on a building at Harvard,” they made it big because they were right once.

• Being young is a major standard for today’s  “creative engineers.” Most of them have dropped out of college “to pursue their passion and their private jets.”  As Lane mentioned, “This is not a generation of Sam Waltons. They are not salesmen or necessarily people persons. These youngsters grew up very much at home with available technologies, contents and various platforms for contents.”

• Success is achieved by boldly pursuing a dream. What’s the best path to take? The traditional response is to work hard at school and then find a mentor to help you in your career, which you should pursue at a slow and steady pace. This method is probably recognizable, but most of today’s ultra-successful tech billionaires followed a different path by boldly pursuing a dream and ignoring society’s expectations of them. They are exceptional, eccentric, and daring. They enthrall the world with their intense pace, big hunger, and progressive leadership. As reported, “They have the hottest companies in the world. They are all turning just one brilliant insight or hook into money at a rate never before seen in human history — creating companies that, even with no revenue, garner insane valuations.”

• Making it big in the tech industry as complete outsiders.  Pejman Nozad began working as a carpet store salesman. He turned out to be a great one and an even better networker. Through his talking and listening skills and genuine affection, Nozad developed relationships with many of the businessmen and tech leaders who visited the store. And in due course, he leveraged these connections to start an investment fund, which invested early in successful companies like Dropbox — earning over US$100 million in the process.

• Generate support from friends. The story of Tumblr backs this claim. Today, the passionately triumphant social network is a top tech business, yet founder David Karp never planned for it to be a business. He was just happy to have the tool for his personal use. Luckily, he had a mentor, entrepreneur Fred Seibert, who recognized Tumblr’s vast potential for success, and managed to persuade Karp to turn his product into an enterprise. At the start, Karp detested being a manager and looking over the growth of his company. But he carried on and Tumblr prospered. Eventually, the company’s success attracted Yahoo!, and the tech giant bought Karp’s blogging platform for over a billion dollars. Because of Seibert’s advice and insistence, Karp turned his basic concept into a monumental achievement.

• Develop simple solutions to small, everyday problems. Jack Dorsey is best known for his world-changing product, Twitter, but he also has a billion-dollar investment in Square — a payment-processing company. Square was stimulated by a real-life problem: Dorsey’s friend, a glassblower, lost a $2,500 sale because he didn’t have the tools to process a credit card payment. Dorsey set out to find a solution, and ended up creating a very cheap smartphone-based terminal that would allow small businesses to accept credit cards. It was a very straightforward solution, and it was also Dorsey’s second billion-dollar idea.

• Challenge established companies and business models. Aaron Levie, the founder of Box, a company that allows you to share and edit files and documents on any apparatus, went through this route. Four main companies dominated the computer service for many years; their dominance however, didn’t lead to innovations in the tech industry. For startups like Box, this situation presented an opportunity. The Box app allows people to share, open and edit files on any device, and also offers a free basic service without requiring users to pay for upgrades. The company’s nimble, efficient approach has proven to be a huge success: by 2013, Box had $124 million in revenues, making even traditional powers clamor for a partnership with it.

• Create entirely new ways of doing business. Faced with a market completely dominated by hotels and guesthouses, Airbnb founder Brian Chesky developed a whole new model for hospitality. Airbnb’s out-of-the-box idea allows people to connect online to find private lodging while traveling. Although Airbnb’s share of the hotel market is still considerably small  — $100 million of a billion-dollar industry — established companies have taken note. Airbnb poses such a threat to the conventional mode of doing business that the hotel industry is depending on government regulation to restrain the company’s expansion.

• Overcome failures. The story of Dropbox founder Drew Houston epitomizes this lesson. Dropbox came about when Houston needed to pull up a few files, but realized they were on another computer. He started working on his idea right away, developing the basic technology that would allow him to synchronize files over the Internet. Five years later, Houston has a $600-million stake in his $4 billion company.

• Iterate and put something out in the world and let people use it. Most people have heard the story of how a team of seven led by Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger built more or less what Instagram is today, and it only took 14 months for their valuation to skyrocket to the point that Facebook decided to snatch it up for a billion dollars. What most people haven’t heard is that Instagram wasn’t a straight shot to success. It wasn’t like they knew exactly what they were going to build at the beginning. Systrom worked for three years at Google and after that a startup called Nextstop before raising funding for an app called Burbn. The app did a lot of things but the feature that was getting most heavily adopted was the photo sharing. That portion of the app is what eventually turned into Instagram.

• Tweak products to adjust to the needs and wants of consumers. Jan Koum, the genius behind WhatsApp, and co-founder Brian Acton, originally launched their company as an address book for the iPhone, which allowed users to update their status. Although the initial idea didn’t resonate with users, things changed when Joum and Acton combined the concept with Apple’s new “push notification” feature. Now every time you update your status, all your WhatsApp contacts will get a notification about it. Remarkably, people started using the app in a totally different way than originally intended — an instant messaging service. WhatsApp quickly changed its focus and its user base grew to $480 million before Facebook acquired it in 2014.

Other instant billionaires who turned just one brilliant insight into big bucks as mentioned in the book include the following:

Elon Musk: The billionaire founder of Paypal, electric carmaker Tesla, and private space company SpaceX. His extreme ambition is matched by his preternatural engineering mind.

Evan Spiegel: The 23-year-old declined a $3 billion cash offer from Mark Zuckerberg — after making Zuckerberg come to Snapchat’s headquarters in Los Angeles — an unheard-of response from a young startup to one of the biggest players in Silicon Valley. Lane wrote, “The story of Snapchat’s origin is even wilder than Facebook’s, but Spiegel’s ability to parlay infamy and popularity into revenue is still up in the air, even as Snapchat’s valuation continues to grow.”

Alex Karp: An eccentric philosopher with almost no tech background turned Palantir, a Peter Thiel-backed venture, into a data-mining champion, with clients like the FBI and the CIA. Amid heated privacy concerns, Karp continues to grow Palantir like crazy, to $196 million in funding and an estimated one billion dollars in contracts in 2014.

Lane declared, “In Zuckerberg’s era, a million dollars isn’t cool; a billion dollars is. In the land of the young tech elite, a billion isn’t cool anymore; 10 billion is.”

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