It appears you're putting the equal sign between developer ability and business success. Being a great developer lands you a good job with a 6-figure yearly salary. Being successful in business requires a different sort of talent.
Business "talent" is primarily about knowing what matters. There are lots of Groupon clones or other startups where founders can't do basic arithmetic on user acquisition costs or lifetime customer value, or they choose to work on scaling the backend prematurely or on solving things that will not matter unless they achieve product/market fit and scale. Recognizing priorities and working on what matters is also talent, or more precisely, a lot of hard work.
Once you have product/market fit, doing risk management is a must and nowadays it seems to be a lacking skill (look at this incident or the Dropbox story from a couple of days ago). But doing risk management is like translating your business in French: if you're big it pays off to do it but otherwise you should be more worried about not dying.
Therefore I'm not surprised when I see that people who are focused on not dying more than risk management have been more successful in reaching... "success" (managing it once you've got it is another business)
I am a young 20 something, right out of college, first time startup founder, developer and with almost zero business knowledge guy. It's hard to accept the truth you are saying, but I am learning.
Just make sure you can tie everything you do to your customer's needs. If you find yourself thinking about technology for technology's sake (e.g. "let's rewrite in Scala" or "We need a 12-tier system to manage scalability) (for you curtsy user...)), start worrying.
Fortunately, there is an easy cure: go talk to customers. Your good customers (or potential customers) will point you the right way.
Business "talent" is primarily about knowing what matters. There are lots of Groupon clones or other startups where founders can't do basic arithmetic on user acquisition costs or lifetime customer value, or they choose to work on scaling the backend prematurely or on solving things that will not matter unless they achieve product/market fit and scale. Recognizing priorities and working on what matters is also talent, or more precisely, a lot of hard work.
Once you have product/market fit, doing risk management is a must and nowadays it seems to be a lacking skill (look at this incident or the Dropbox story from a couple of days ago). But doing risk management is like translating your business in French: if you're big it pays off to do it but otherwise you should be more worried about not dying.
Therefore I'm not surprised when I see that people who are focused on not dying more than risk management have been more successful in reaching... "success" (managing it once you've got it is another business)