HN Explorer

Ask HN: What big successes have come from people involved in the startup scene?

14 points by AlexMuir ↗ HN
It seems to me that the people who start big, successful web businesses do so from outside the 'startup community'. By that I mean that Mark Zuckerberg wasn't on HN (or the 2004 equivilant BBS). He wasn't blogging, or going to meetups - he was quietly building a product (and working freelance I believe).

The same with the Skype guys.

So I'm wondering, can anyone point to a web presence from someone who built something big, but from before they built it? I'm looking to be able to follow someone from 'Hey, is this a good idea?' to 'I've just sold - I'm now an angel'.

6 comments

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trin_
you might recognize this guy

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/

AlexMuir
That's a great example. He wasn't involved in startups though, more an academic capacity turned into a business. Pretty much a classic example of working on something quietly and turning it into something awesome.
_delirium
Some of the cloud stuff is from people from the "startup scene", I think: Dropbox, Heroku, etc.
Detrus
Did the startup scene have a web presence where people used their real names? It does now, there are a lot of CETFOs on Quora using their real names, answering questions about startups. Lets see where that leads.
AlexMuir
Surely there must be people on HN who were posting while they started up, and went on to be successful? The site's been going three years now...
thisorthat
I think the best things in the world is to be successful without people knowing that you are. So you can live peacefully with your FU money.

I am sure plenty of people are successful in terms of business growth and earnings but they get no media coverage.