Judging from all the tech startup stories, so many have gone from the value of nothing to millions, if not billions, within matter of a few years. To name a few :
- Facebook worth $100 billion - Launched February 2004
- Dropbox worth $5 Billion - Launched 2008, touted as Y Combinator's most successful investment to date.
- Also the highlights of Y Combinator, a angel investor that have invested in 313 startups, Loopt, Reddit, Clustrix, Wufoo, Scribd, Xobni, Weebly, Songkick, Disqus, ZumoDrive, Justin.tv, Heroku, Posterous, Airbnb, Heyzap, Cloudkick, DailyBooth, WePay, and Bump.
Related article : Y Combinator Accepts Record 60+ New Startups For Summer 2011
From my point of view, these success stories only concentrate on creating a wrong perception of companies easily making millions overnight and therefore the stories are being told wrong and people need to get it.
Here is one article about a huge success story of a famous mobile game called Angry Bird :
Angry Birds creator could be worth $1.2 billion soon which ends with a conclusion, "Seriously, who predicted that something as simple as throwing birds at pigs could be so profitable?". The conclusion somewhat implies that the game itself is simple and pretty much straight forward and could perceive the readers as it was easily made.
However, according to article In depth: How Rovio made Angry Birds a winner (and what's next), Angry Birds was Rovio's 52nd game, and they went nearly bankrupt before creating this massive attraction.
Another story is with Justin.TV which is said to be valued at one-billion dollar although I was not able to find a solid proof on this matter. The founders have accumulated tens of thousands dollars in personal credit card debt before they were accept into Y Combinator in 2008, which Y Combinator now accepts the fact that they have made one of the biggest home run with Just.tv.
There are tons of other stories similar to above, but I would like to point out only one thing. Given the fact that I am in Computer Science program, I often hear a lot about people in the program starting a new project that can potentially make them millions and was invited to a number of them. However, what I have observed so far is that, they tend to enjoy day dreaming about their ideas making tons of fortune instead of actually enjoying the process that involves in it. Also, because of it, most groups fail within a few weeks because they are often blinded by the day dreams to comprehend the amount of the effort it is going to cost them. They know that startups are hard, but they do not get how hard it is, largely because you are more likely to hear about startups when they are doing great but not when they are struggling.
I agree with you that more often than not, you hear success stories about start-ups. There is probably some ratio, that for every successful start-up, there are some number of failed start-ups. It would be interesting to see data on this topic.
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