He compares himself to the nearly-forgotten "hero" scientists. But he really belongs to the ranks of the unknown multitude of almost-successful "forgotten" - the people who spent their lives pursuing their ideas but those ideas were never received well, or popularised.

I keep seeing startups almost succeed. They got everything "right", there's nothing they did wrong, but for some reason it didn't take off. While others don't even get the basics right and yet it soars. There doesn't seem to be any reason for it. Or at least none that I can see.

We don't know why something "goes viral". We can't predict that, can't control it. Just try to make the most of it if it happens to us.

There's a vast pool of people all trying to do things, in every discipline. For reasons we (and they) don't understand, some of them "succeed" and are popularised. We hear about them. The rest are mostly ignored. We don't hear about them. There's nothing we can particularly identify as making an individual succeed or not. Like everything in life, the process doesn't care about individuals. It's the genetic approach - spread the population over a large area and let the successful ones survive to the next generation. The rest of them die bitterly regretting their failure in blog posts.