[raiyu]

I think there are several major lessons there that can be generalized to an extent.

1. If you don't have the funds to start a business directly, you may have to acquire them indirectly. In our case building a service business was much faster and you could literally setup a single server at a datacenter and call yourself a web host. So the startup capital was small and something that you could certainly acquire by saving while working a high paying job like System administration back in the day.

2. Be in the right place at the right time - this one is key for pretty much everyone everywhere and is one the of the main factors in success and failure. By itself it isn't everything but it is a huge component. We started doing web hosting before AWS existed and when the largest player in the space was Rackspace. There was plenty of room for small up-start individual providers and the internet was still rapidly expanding and also very much still catering to the early adopters.

3. Learn Business - You hear the stories of people like Mark Zuckerburg starting something in college and then building one of the largest companies in the world, but those are ideas that require a special time and place in history. Where the product is the key driver to it's success in many ways, and many non-consumer startups don't get as much attention, but I would certainly recommend learning business. That doesn't mean get an MBA, but read business books. That's what we did between our first company and then starting DigitalOcean. We definitely made a ton of mistakes with the first business and the books helped to elucidate what we did wrong, while also showing us what are the right questions to ask to avoid those same mistakes in the future. I think of business lessons like laws of physics, it's better to know them if you are going to be building around them and certainly the results speak for themselves. The first business peaked at around $5MM in revenue and $DOCN will do over $500MM this year.

Another DO? Definitely not. It was a time and place that allowed us to be successful. Plus if DO exists competing with it head on wouldn't make sense. Also if it didn't exist, I imagine someone would make a similar company that would succeed. You can see this clearly with all of the different versions of Heroku that people tried to build. DigitalOcean's success means that there is a market for the service that it provides and so, someone would have come along and created something to fill that void.

Lastly, I think that a lot of great businesses have to sound a bit stupid at the beginning. If they didn't sound stupid then someone would have built it already. Occasionally you can have a good sounding business idea, but then literally, nothing compelling should exist in the space as a competitor. Otherwise, it would already be done. So in a sense the fact that it sounds "stupid" means that it's different. Now is it good different, or bad different, that's a question that you have to figure out. But often that difference is the crux of what is the key driver for your success.

For us it was creating a simple version of AWS and competing directly (though in our case we felt it was indirect enough) with them. For Airbnb it was the crazy idea that people would pay money to stay in a strangers house. Occasionally an idea actually makes sense from the start. If you use a data warehouse and tried to do analytics before Looker it was a bit of a pain in the butt so Looker does seem straight forward. And certainly DataDog already existed in many different flavors, such as Nagios, but repackaging something and then riding another wave (AWS) can create massive success if the "wave" is large enough.

I think to truly count yourself as "fantastic" at the game of startups you would need to create 3 successful businesses. Because so much of it is chance, timing, luck, that can't be ignored. But if you can do it 3 times, I think that definitely speaks to a person's ability to spot the intersection of so many critical factors.