The general steps in becoming successful (eg starting a famous company, becoming a famous musician)

3. Know as much as you can about technology

The beautiful thing about technology is that it changes ever day. Look at any tech you can see today or have ever seen. Any tech you have read about. It was invented by someone(s). They know the product better than everyone. On the day that it is released, you are as knowledgeable about that technology as anyone else in the world. From there its just about effort to keep learning.

If you are one of the few people that know the new technologies, you are in a unique position to put yourself in the shoes of your customer(s) and determine if the new technology can be of benefit. New technologies enable change and where there is change there is opportunity. Its up to you to figure out what that opportunity is.

...from the time I saw that road engine as a boy of twelve right forward to to-day, my great interest has been in making a machine that would travel the roads. Driving to town I always had a pocket full of trinkets--nuts, washers, and odds and ends of machinery. Often I took a broken watch and tried to put it together. When I was thirteen I managed for the first time to put a watch together so that it would keep time. By the time I was fifteen I could do almost anything in watch repairing--although my tools were of the crudest. There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. It is not possible to learn from books how everything is made--and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made. Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them, and if he has any brains he will apply those ideas.

Source: Henry Ford, "My Life and Work"

If there’s a checklist for tech wunderkind, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey leaves no box unticked. There’s the shoelessness, for one; he commutes in sandals and regularly pads barefoot around the Oculus offices in Irvine, California. There’s the tousled hair, the anachronistic attachment to his 75-mpg 2001 Honda Insight, the can of vitamin-enriched sparkling blackberry juice seemingly glued to his hand, and the confidence that comes from knowing a lot of things about a lot of things (or possibly from all that juice).

But most of all, there’s the omnivorous curiosity. As a home-schooled teenager in Southern California, Luckey spent much of his free time tinkering with electronics—modding videogame consoles and repairing iPhones for extra cash, then spending the money on high-powered laser systems and upgrades for his gaming PC. The PC, in particular, became an obsession: Luckey found himself pouring tens of thousands of dollars into it. And soon, a hunt for 3-D monitors became a search for true immersion. As a kid, he’d been entranced by the idea of getting inside the videogames he played on his Gameboy Color. Virtual-world sci-fi like The Matrix and the anime show Yu-Gi-Oh! intensified the desire. Why, he asked himself, can’t we do that yet?

His modding and iPhone repair work had left him with a lot of money, so he bought a $400 Vuzix iWear VR920, then the most cutting-edge consumer VR headset—enthusiasts call them HMDs, for head-mounted displays—on the market. Then he moved on to the more expensive eMagin Z800 3DVisor. And he kept looking. Over time, through a combination of government auctions and private resellers, he would spend the money once earmarked for PC upgrades on more than 50 different units, building what he touts as the largest private collection in the world.

Spurred by Page's obsession with Tesla, who unwittingly gave away his inventions by sharing them with others, Page and Brin zealously guarded the algorithms that created PageRank. ['Googled', p39]

The battle of life is already half won by the young man who is brought personally in contact with high officials; and the great aim of every boy should be to do something beyond the sphere of his duties--something which attracts the attention of those over him.

Source: The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, and Colin Kroll, co-founder of Vine are among the people signed up to judge, after receiving cold emails from Zoneraich and Berry.

They sent similar emails to many tech luminaries, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

“No harm in trying,” Zoneraich said.

Nearly a year after Graham’s death, Forbes magazine published a more detailed explanation of his formula in an article titled “Ben Graham’s Last Will and Testament.” The article seized the attention of Joel Greenblatt, then a 19-year-old college junior from Long Island who had left high school a year early to attend !e Wharton School. “A light bulb went off,” Joel said of reading the Forbes article. “I can’t tell you exactly what it was about it that made me very excited, but it had elements of the things I was interested in: how to look at companies, how to think about the stock market, how to do something with a formula that could actually make money. For whatever reason, that’s when I really got turned on to the stock market.”

The article inspired Joel to test Graham’s formula for a more recent period, from April 1972 to April 1978, a period that included both a severe bear market and a sharp recovery. He enlisted the help of two classmates, Bruce Newberg and Richard Pzena, to conduct this new study. “Joel was an intense, focused guy back in college,” remembered Richard, who now heads Pzena Investment Management, a $15 billion investment firm in New York. “But then and now, he had one of the most upbeat, enthusiastic, and decent dispositions of anybody I've known. He just made you feel like working with him was an honor.”

The historical data the three students needed for their research was not yet available in computer databases, so they sat in Wharton’s Lippincott Library with a stack of Standard & Poor’s stock guides. Starting with the A’s, they resolved to go line by line through the guides until they had collected a random and unbiased sample of companies. After several months of work, 750 stocks seemed like enough — although the students did not get as far into the alphabet as they had hoped. “We took just the A’s and B’s, which was a decent chunk of the universe at the time,” Joel remembered. “Physically, the three of us just couldn't do any more.”

The trio then entered their handwritten data into a DEC10, one of the few computers on campus at the time. “It took up an entire room, and was secured and climate-controlled,” Richard said. “You sat at a terminal and punched data onto IBM punch cards, and fed them into the computer for analysis.” They used the computer to back-test four model portfolios they had come up with, each based on slight variations of the same factors Graham himself had used.2 Just as Graham had, the students made no effort to evaluate individual companies, industries, or management teams and used only data that would have been widely available had they been managing the portfolios in real time.

The results were outstanding. Each of the four model portfolios beat its relevant index by over 10 percent a year after trading costs and taxes, and with only slightly more volatility. The top portfolio returned 29.2 percent per year, but any one of them would have beaten nearly every professionally managed portfolio over the same period.

Joel, who thought about one day becoming an author, wrote up their results as formally as he could and submitted the paper to several academic publications. One rejected it outright, and he heard nothing from the others until he got a letter from Peter Bernstein, who was then editor of the Journal of Portfolio Management. Bernstein agreed to publish the paper on one condition. “He said he loved the study,” Joel remembered. “But he added, ‘Could you please have someone who can write send it back?’” Joel duly made the language a little less formal, and the revised paper was eventually published in the summer of 1981.

Source: Santangel's Review (it's a really good article)

So it finally happened, Facebook snatched up WhatsApp for the not so bargain price of $16B to the simultaneous head explosion of every entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. A common cry echoed around the world "But, but, how is WhatsApp any different than iMessage / Facebook Messenger / Hangouts?"

To that, I have one answer: J2ME

See, WhatsApp wasn't born in Silicon Valley on an iPhone, rather it fought its way to a $16B exit by providing an awesome messaging experience to the middle billion, those living on $10 a day. And you know what, on $10 a day you probably don't have an iPhone or an Android handset. Rather you are probably carrying around a "feature phone", one of a thousands variations of handsets built by Nokia or Samsung running a version of Java 2 Mobile Edition. (J2ME)

Writing J2ME apps is no cakewalk. While Android developers might whine about having to support myriad resolutions and versions of the API, J2ME ends up being less a standard and more a series of rough guidelines. There is no shortcut, you just have to test on every device, each with its own unique bugs and idiosyncrasies. Building a high quality app aimed at J2ME is the very definition of shlep, it is incredibly time consuming, boring and frustrating work.

That was the genius of WhatsApp really, they recognized that messaging apps are all about network effects and instead of focusing on the comparatively small market of the 'developed world', instead targeted the other 3 billion people who don't have smartphones. And at that they have been supremely successful.

If you are anywhere apart from the States, WhatsApp is the de facto standard for messaging. Here in Rwanda, it has far more penetration than Facebook, it is used by literally everybody who has a capable device. That came about not by having some edgy new user interface, or by a gimmick around disappearing messages, but by providing real value, value that can be measured in the pocketbook of a market that is massively under served.

Jimmy Wales:
Before I answer your question directly (and I promise I will) let me just offer the opinion that young entrepreneurs often think this is a real problem which faces them, when in fact the opposite problem is much much much more likely to be the case: far from other people seeing your thing as "legen-wait for it-dary" as you put it , no one will care about you or your idea at all.

Notice that this is more true the more paranoid you are about it. Just a few days ago I got a 3 page pitch letter from someone who simply described to me in stereotypical buzzwords how I could add synergistic brand value to their revolutionary value-add concept that would blah blah blah - 3 pages with absolutely no information whatsoever about what the hell the person wants to do.

I remember when I first had the idea for a freely licensed encyclopedia written by volunteers. I remember a feeling of urgency and panic because the idea seemed so obvious that I thought lots of people would be competing with me, so I rushed out and hired Larry Sanger to work for me as editor in chief of the project, and we launched Nupedia as quickly as possible. Nearly two years later, with the project generally unsuccessful at that point, no one else was competing with us at all. My panic about someone rushing to compete with me was not justified.

Now, to answer your question directly because, despite my view that in general this isn't really the problem that you face, sometimes it is, and it's worth a few words about that.

First, if your idea is the sort of thing that could be reasonably patented, then you can work to file a patent. I'm not a big believer in this for most things (particularly not software or dot-com ideas, where I find patents to be useless for protecting startups and pernicious for the industry as a whole), but if your legendary concept is a genuine scientific/engineering invention, then by all means, get a patent.

Second, and I'm stealing this line from Facebook (probably Mark Zuckerberg said it first, I don't know): Move fast and break things. This is particularly important if there are "network externalities" in your idea, or any other kind of genuine "first mover advantage". (Though notice: both those concepts are much much much overused.)

Just get moving and don't look back.

Ok, so that is my direct answer, but now I want to go back and remind you of my first answer. THIS IS PROBABLY NOT THE PROBLEM THAT YOU REALLY HAVE. Far far more entrepreneurs have lost out on great opportunities because they were so paranoid about someone stealing their idea that they were unable to raise capital, unable to get started, unable to actually DO anything.