Odds of Winning a Silicon Valley Jackpot.

The recently announced acquisition of Instagram by Facebook has evoked an article with this title:

$1 Billion Start-Up Jackpot: The Behind-The-Scenes Winners At Instagram. 

Clearly, some form of a product that appeals to the billions of netizens is the prerequisite for such a jackpot.

However, here's a little tongue-in-cheek way of analyzing for the odds.

Now, if you are an engineer with all the right personal ingredients to create a startup, you'd do well to consider the following facts:

1. The odds of someone's winning MEGA Millions jackpot, which reached recently as high as $640 million, is 1 in 176 million, according to California Lottery web site.
2. The odds of someone's winning the smaller SuperLotto Plus jackpot is 1 in 41 million, also according to California Lottery web site.
3. The San Francisco Bay Area, of which Silicon Valley is a part, would rank first [in the United States] with 387,000 high-tech jobs.

Now, what are the odds of an engineer's succeeding in Silicon Valley? Consider this:

Whither Agile Methodology?

Agile methodology has been in use in many corporations around the globe. Perhaps the best example of the results of this methodology is the mindboggling frequency with which newer versions of browsers are being made available. (For example, in just over three years, Google Chrome has been released in 18 major versions, not to speak of many more minor versions: Today, it is 18.0.1025.151 m).

In What Agile Teams Think of Agile Principles (subscription), Laurie Williams describes some research she conducted recently that reassures us that the original 12 principles of Agile Manifesto, crafted about 10 years ago, are still very much valid among agile practitioners. Here is an excerpt from the conclusions of that article:

The authors of the Agile Manifesto and the original 12 principles spelled out the essence of the agile trend that has transformed the software industry over more than a dozen years. That is, they nailed it.

This reassurance is valuable because there are still pockets of developer groups that are still uncertain as to whether to embrace Agile methodology.