Most entrepreneurs want one thing, and that would be being called successful. The definition of successful is highly subjective, leading from getting a lot of fame [and no money] to getting a lot of money[and little fame]. Some do manage to achieve both, we have candidates like Mark Zukerberg, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and quite a few in the recent past. There has never been a better time in history for nerds to achieve both fame and money at such a young age.
What intrigues me the most is the stories that get spun post the success. The prime example is that of twitter, its projection post-success is that of a broadcast model of democracy! I highly doubt the initial founders had imagined this small pet project as such a nuanced concept. Another simple case is that of Facebook, the founders wanted very human things out of it and it ended up becoming a “social graph”. It is again very clear that is not the goal they started off with.
What I am getting at is how we make our lives rather complicated by trying to model success. There are no defined models, if there were one no-one would ever fail at this game [which is clearly not the case]. You need to learn the best traits and not necessarily attempt to replicate the final assessed model. So, the best thing that Facebook taught me was the fact that you need a great initial set of users to start something of this nature. Without the initial Ivy league groups, Facebook would not have the kind of quality users it had initially. The lesson one learns from twitter is that never underestimate the capability of simple ideas, whenever the world tends to absurd complexity one twitter[or iphone] does happen and it shocks us !
The art is in creating utilities that are easy to use, so stop trying to model success. Get on the creation wagon, let the fittest survive.