Paul Graham：Black Swan Farming, Excerpt 4

It also reminds you that the vast majority of ideas that seem bad are bad. The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to recognize the big winners. It means the probability of a startup making it really big is not merely not a constant fraction of the probability that it will succeed, but that the startups with a high probability of the former will seem to have a disproportionately low probability of the latter. History tends to get rewritten by big successes, so that in retrospect it seems obvious they were going to make it big. For that reason one of my most valuable memories is how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it. A site for college students to waste time?

Source： https://paulgraham.com/swan.html
Locator：Essay, additional excerpt 4 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

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