Been hearing a lot of this story all the time, whether if it's the apple garage, or that guy getting declined by facebook and started a new company, or if it's this teenager who got bought out by yahoo... it's inspiring but is rarely really true. I confirmed it when one of my former boss went public and earned billions in one day. I read the news about it and it's the same pattern, it mentioned that this guy started working for a fastfood company and finally ended up earning billions in his tech IPO. But the true story is, this guy was already rich. His parents are already sits on the board of larger companies.Further, he started tens of startups that failed, and he then gets some funding again from his parents and siblings.
The bottom line, the key to success (I mean earning billions), is not working hard or have a great idea, the key is to have a rich family, because having rich friends is not enough. If you are poor but have a great idea, your rich "friends" will just steal it, they have money to spend on legal fees so they don't mind. Lastly, success is a lot like the lottery, you have to keep on trying till you hit the jackpot. And you have to have money to burn. Some of us win, most do not, but those who won, would not give credit to luck. They will tell that they had a system on betting, or they kept a number of years...
Lastly, I had a good (not great) idea before, and was invited by a TELCO company to demo it. After the demo, they simple ignored it and asked me if I had other ideas, and after some time, I saw an app just like mine in the appstore, with the screenshots showing the profile pic of the guy I demoed it to.
True Story