They were all dependent on luck and outside circumstances. Without Bill&#x27;s mother&#x27;s connections that got him in the door at IBM, Microsoft may&#x27;ve never been anything more than a blip. Without the gross indifference to search pre-Google (Y! focused on being a &quot;web portal&quot;, not search results), Page&#x2F;Brin may&#x27;ve just been starving grad students that eventually found a semi-OK job in academia. Most blatantly, if Jobs didn&#x27;t have a passive engineer like Woz to co-opt, he would&#x27;ve been just another self-centered burnout.