It's kind on interesting that a lot of the above companies success of those mentioned correlates with founders being smart / high IQ. Gates & Zuck got near perfect SATs, the Google guys are obviously smart, the Airbnb CTO was a Harvard CompSci. The Color guys on the other had went to second string colleges. The exception is Louis Borders at Webvan who did Math at MIT and presumably was smart but still he did ok at Borders and you can't win them all. Maybe the trick is to have smarter guys than the competition. Paul Graham himself kinds of fits - I suspect Viaweb won out against 30 or so competitors not so much because he used lisp as because he was a guy smart enough to design his own lisp.
“The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed”
Once you throw in the success stories like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and James Cameron, it seems that the benefits really accrue to those people that were lucky enough to be near "a lump of the future", and fearless enough to capitalize on it.
Of course, you can make your own luck to a degree: One of the big advantages to attending a top research university is that you get exposed to stuff that the rest of the world won’t see for another decade or so. This was especially the case with Bill Gates since he not only had access to a powerful computer while in college, but he also attended a high school that had rare access to a computer. Since smarts correlates with getting into a good university, it makes sense that smart people would be overrepresented in technology success stories.
But, then you have Larry Ellison who read research papers and happened to find the one that laid out the theory for relational databases. Like Bill Gates, he got lucky that IBM didn’t fully appreciate the value of that idea. Similarly, James Cameron would go read grad students’ theses while working as a truck driver, after he had dropped out of community college.
Steve Jobs was pretty lucky in that he grew up near Silicon Valley when and where a lot of future technology was being invented. But, he was fearless enough to reach out to Bill Hewlett (co-founder of HP) and ended up getting a summer job there. So he got a lump of the future at 12 years old, kind of like Gates did.
But here’s the thing about getting access to lumps of the future: thanks to Moore’s Law, any of us can live in the future by spending enough money. But, it does not seem to occur to most programmers that they should be playing with $50K[1] computers instead of the $1-$5K computers that are already yesterday’s machines before they even hit the store shelves.
[1] To say nothing of playing with a $192,000 machine, which is equivalent to the one that BG used, adjusted for inflation.
Or perhaps its almost entirely luck, and you're just arguing from a viewpoint of survivorship bias. Phrases like "are obviously smart," "you can't win them all", and "maybe the trick is" certainly suggest that.
