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I think a lot of it comes down to how you define "luck". Finding the right investor or employee involves a lot of luck, as does getting helped or hurt by a Google algorithm change. Google itself was lucky that it raised a lot of money shortly before the tech crash that killed off many of its competitors.

A better way of understanding the startup world is that everything has a high degree of uncertainty (which you can call luck), and so the smart strategy is to remain as agile as possible, and continually learn from the market in order to refine your strategy and vision. I prefer to think of it as Newton's method of product/market discovery, and the most successful startups are those who are able to iterate the fastest.

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, at least that's what Seneca said.

Bad luck is generally thought of as wrong place/wrong time, so good luck would be the inverse.

Most start-ups try to solve right place by moving to the Silicon Valley and then iterate on ideas/timing.

Leaves a lot of room for those who go down the path of finding a customer with a problem they can solve first and building from there.

> While I believe this (the luck part), I'm not sure most startup folks do.

Probably because it's not exactly true. The whole point of all that data is to see which aspects of a business work and which parts don't. The author is describing pivots a bit hyperbolically for the sake of drama/artistic license, but it's not like the C-level executives pivot by rolling the dice and seeing what they come up with. A successful pivot works by observing which parts work, dropping the parts that don't work, and building up the parts that people like.

Think about the last SV product/service you purchased. Did you buy it because you had a random thought, or did you buy it because it actually solved a need of yours?

One of the fundamental problems in American society is the failure to recognize that hard work is a necessary but not sufficient condition for big success. Yes, you do need to work hard, and do a hundred other things right, but even then, it still may not be enough to really make that big break. So yes, you need to analyze your customer data, have a great idea, smart people, and so on, but it may still not be enough, and there's no way to really predict which startup amongst the many hitting the necessary conditions for success will actually go on to be an apple or a google. That's the point that Adams is making here. (And I kinda hate agreeing with Scott Adams, but on this one, I do.)

When you realize that you have this kind of a system, you want to put in place institutions which underwrite failures, to allow your talented people the ability to try out big ideas that might be the next big winner. Such systems are hard (but not impossible) to put in place: There's a good argument to be made that academia is at its core one huge such hedge, allowing talented people (good enough to get through the tenure process) a long-ish leash to try out new ideas in the hopes of developing something both novel and (every once in a while) exciting. The flip side is that you need a gatekeeper system of some sort to minimize parasites, and hopefully also to ensure diversity in your boys club.

> hard work is a necessary [...] condition for big success

I think this is not always true, therefore wrong.

If you allow me to extend the notion of success to old writers, I can give the example of La Fontaine, whose poems are still read and learnt by kids and grown-ups 300 years after he wrote them. He is often considered as a lazy guy.

So hard working is certainly not sufficient, and not even always necessary for success. So long for this magical recipe. For me, luck (be there at the right time) is the best non-magical explanation for success-stories, and any non-superstitious book accounting the successes of our times should have one page and only three words on it: "He was lucky".

Jean de La Fontaine was a lawyer from an affluent family who married a woman from another affluent family very young. While we cannot deny his work I don't know if using someone who was born into a family that allowed him to not both seek a law degree and not actually have to work as a model in comparison to starting a sustainable business.

Sure, he was lucky. But being born into a wealthy family was his luck, not just writing a few lines out of the blue and being thought of as the first poet to understand the nuance of French.

Succeeding in the startup world is luck like succeeding in poker is luck. Sure, there is an element of luck undeniably involved, but in the long term, raw talent should play a significant role as well.

I, for one, liked your analogy. Poker is an excellent example of how talent combines with luck.

You do realize that you can play hundreds of poker hands in a night. For your analogy to hold, you'd need to be able to start companies for a million years.

Of course! There are professional poker players who run bad for months at a time even. Variance is a cruel mistress. That doesn't negate the fact that talent certainly gives you an edge in poker or in the startup world. It's easy to say it's all luck, but that attitude doesn't pay service to the many successful people who had raw talent or an excellent idea in addition to the luck that allowed them to become successful.

Call me cynical, but to me it feels like the people working on the startup are the cards of the game, being played by the VCs and the status quo.

Depends on the point in the funding cycle. I'm not sure this applied during the dotcom bubble. Most of them got wiped out.

A better game analogy would be a game of dice where you win by rolling double 6's. Except that to be able to roll in the first place, you have to be able to solve all of the differential equations in the back of a college engineering textbook.

What's the best way to improve your odds at this game? Be sure you get to roll more than once.

I suspect you might not be paying enough attention to the issue.

Most startup folks don't believe this because it would mean they aren't the special snowflakes they think they are.

I think this also explains why most startup founders are the age that they are. The further my 30th birthday recedes into the past, the more the "success is mostly luck" hypothesis rings true. I'd be much more reluctant to roll the dice now than 10 years ago. (On a related not, fame and fortune seem less appealing now as well.)

You must be well off? Fortune seems far more important to me now that it's rather late in the day to be doing anything about it ... [fame can hang for all I care].

Hah, far from it. Being wealthy would be great but having seen several acquaintances sacrifice health, relationships, and happiness in pursuit of that goal, I've come to the conclusion that it's simply not worth it. I side squarely with the Mexican fisherman, you might say.

> Of course, when a 9-figure exit happens to someone who can't code as good as you and didn't go to as good a school as you–then it was most definitely luck.

Or maybe s/he had a better idea than you had? Doesn't look like luck to me.

I think he/she was saying that as an example of a way that "most people" rationalize things. It follows this sentence:

"When you combine all those things and still fail, most people will blame something besides just luck. [...]"

This is true as long as your definition of "better idea" is the one that goes on to have a larger exit. That doesn't mean that luck wasn't involved in getting there.