one of the best things about YC is the peer group and the environment. you get a lot from talking to your new friends who are going through exactly the same thing you are.
^A scalable job, according to Taleb, is any job where given success, the amount of money you make is vastly disproportionate to the amount of time you put in--like starting a company, or becoming an actor or musician. A non-scalable job is something like dentistry, where the amount of money you make always stays pretty closely tied to the hours you work.
That's a terrible misuse of the term scalable.
it's not about luck, it's about odds. successful people fail on a consistent basis. the more you put yourself out there the more likely it is that the next time you do you'll get lucky.