You Only Have to Be Right Once summary

After hearing that last story, you might be wondering, “Hmmm. Was Evan Spiegel really an outsider who achieved success solely through hard-work and boldness? After all, weren’t his parents high-powered lawyers? Didn’t he go to Stanford?”

Although there’s some truth to that objection, plenty of tech-billionaires come from different backgrounds. Here are two stories about mega-successful entrepreneurs who came into the tech industry as complete outsiders.

Whenever we read about the latest wildly successful tech wunderkind, we’re tempted to think, “Wow—he must be a genius to accomplish so much at his age!” Not to detract from anyone’s well-earned success, but it’s important to remember that all of these people had lots of help along the way.

To that end, let’s look at the story of Tumblr. Today, the wildly successful social network is a top tech enterprise, yet, founder David Karp never planned for it to be a business. He was just happy to have the tool for his personal use.

What does it take to come up with a great idea? Surely it’s a matter of thinking long and hard about life’s great problems.

Well actually, no — not at all. To be successful, you don’t have to come up with a formula for cold fusion or design a perpetual motion machine. Rather, success often lies in simplicity, in solving a small, everyday problem.

If you want to rise to the top, you’re bound to upset a few people along the way. And tech-billionaires aren’t scared to.

Consider Aaron Levie, the founder of Box, a company which allows you to share and edit files and documents on any device.

In the case of any challenging, competitive venture, success is largely a matter of persistence.

And the story of Dropbox founder Drew Houston epitomizes this lesson. When he was just 14 years old, Houston already knew what he wanted to do. When a teacher asked his classmates what they wanted to be when they grew up, his hand shot up: “I want to run a computer company,” he said.

It’s easy to feel protective of a company you’ve started, but resisting change will get you nowhere. The most successful companies know how to be flexible and respond to what their customers want.

Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, exemplifies this principle. Today, Instagram is an incredibly successful photo-sharing network, which was recently purchased by Facebook for $1 billion. But when it first started, Instagram was a very different kind of company.

So now that we’ve learned about how a few tech-billionaires managed to turn simple ideas into billion-dollar companies, it’s time to find out what it takes to maintain that level of success. Because for tech wunderkinds, it’s not enough to stop at the billion-dollar valuation.

This is especially true because the giant established companies — the ones which were challenged by the upstart entrepreneurs discussed in these blinks — are always trying to reclaim their market dominance.