
What if successful startups are just lucky? - adelivet
http://blog.ploki.info/what-if-successful-startups-are-just-lucky/
======
pg
All successful startups are lucky, but they're never _just_ lucky. If they
were, we could save ourselves a lot of work reading applications and doing
interviews. We could just pick randomly instead. If we did that for one batch,
you'd really be able to tell the difference, believe me.

~~~
nwhitehead
I would absolutely love to see a double-blind randomized experiment with
controls for YC applications. In one batch, randomly and secretly assign
CONTROL or EXPERIMENT to each application (in whatever proportion you are
comfortable with). Of the CONTROL batch, do regular reviews. For the
EXPERIMENT batch, randomly accept the same percentage of groups as the
control. Then have people outside of the reviewers try to label each group
correctly at different stages and see how they do. These people could be: YC
alums, YC staff not on the interview loop, VCs making investments, outside
experienced CEOs, successful startup founders.

For full double-blindness you could even do interviews with the EXPERIMENT
group, then use a program to automatically either use the interview result or
not. This might be aggravating for reviewers, though, seeing their work wasted
by random choices.

~~~
powera
So pg's years of experience getting better than random results is irrelevant
and you'll only believe him if he does a long experiment (that would cost him
lots of money if it's not just luck) to prove something he already believes?

~~~
baddox
Generally, and especially with science, the way things work is that you prove
something _before_ believing it.

~~~
temujin
This is oversimplified. In many cases, it is the conjunction of a reasonably
strong prior belief and the absence of preexisting "proof" that motivates a
scientist (or mathematician) to try to prove something in the first place.

The key is to perform proper Bayesian updates in the face of evidence in
either direction; if you do, as long as your prior wasn't totally insane it
doesn't really matter where you started.

------
kristiandupont
This has been on my mind lately as well, for some reason. That, and the point
of this story [http://sivers.org/horses](http://sivers.org/horses) which is
basically that even after the fact, it's really hard to know anything[1].

I don't know if it's just from growing older but I feel a lot more humble when
looking at peoples ideas and actions than earlier. I literally feel that I
have no clue whether they will succeed or not whereas I used to quickly get
quite strong feelings in one direction or the other. In one way, this feels
more mature and zen but at the same time, it annoys me a bit. I feel that
conviction is the trait of a leader and something I need to possess if I want
to convince anybody to engage in my projects. Maybe I'll just practice faking
it and hope they didn't read this comment :-)

Edit: [1] One of my favorite examples of this is in Felix Denis' book How To
Get Rich where he describes that the problem with Apple is Steve Jobs. This
was written 7 years ago when Apple was struggling and it looked like Steve
Jobs was driving it into the ground with his stubbornness. (The book is
excellent by the way, in spite of the tacky sounding title)

~~~
minikites
Thank you for posting a link to that story. It reminds me a bit of Boethius:

"It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,'
says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when
you're cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the
bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of time,
like the best, are always passing away."

~~~
jacques_chester
Otherwise expressed as

    
    
       This too shall pass.

------
FD3SA
One important point to realize for the author is that games are not services,
they are works of art. As such, you can't say _this is an incredible game_
with the same objectivity as _this is an incredible service_.

Ryzom was a great game, but MMOs are built on one thing: atmosphere. Blizzard
made WoW precisely because WarCraft was its longest running and most popular
brand to date. Blizzard already had a massive fan base of WC fans ready to
play WOW. The lore was considered a masterpiece, which immediately immersed
the players in the world before they even played it.

With services, things are much more objective, because we don't care about
branding. Using a service like Dropbox is not a deeply emotional experience,
but it does work very well. Apple is one of the few companies that can instill
emotion into its services and hardware, and that is due to their marketing and
design philosophies, which are considered the best in the world. However, this
is nowhere near the level of emotion that art invokes.

As such, I would advise the author to carefully distinguish between art and
service. When making art, you should never make it with the expectation that
others will like it. You should make it such that it satisfies your own
tastes. If others like it, you know that your taste is shared. If not, your
tastes are unique. It's a win win.

Don't regret making works of art. It is all that succeeds us when we leave
this realm.

~~~
Amadou
_Don 't regret making works of art. It is all that succeeds us when we leave
this realm._

Until someone turns off the hosting servers.

~~~
scott_karana
Why would anyone do that unless they _were_ dead? :-)

------
jxf
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have
of it."

\-- Thomas Jefferson (apocryphal; see [0])

[0]: [http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-
collections/i-am...](http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-
collections/i-am-great-believer-luckquotation)

~~~
tomasien
Bizarre - the last link I was on was a random ESPN quiz with UVa star Joe
Harris in which that quote was one of the questions. (I realize this is a
pretty meaningless and useless comment, but seeing this quote 2 times in less
than 10 seconds was too much not to mention).

~~~
evanspa
I'm unable to find a definitive reference, but Gary Player (golfing legend) is
also attributed with the quote: "The harder I practice, the luckier I get."
Perhaps that's why it was on ESPN.

Pretty sure George Simmons has this quote of Player's on one of the chapter
pages in his "Precalculus Mathematics in a Nutshell" book.

~~~
gruseom
Quote Investigator has tackled this one:

[http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/07/14/luck/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/07/14/luck/)

The upshot is that its origin is unknown, but goes back at least to a Walter
Winchell column from 1949. Gary Player used it and became associated with it.
The attribution to Jefferson is nonsense, of course.

~~~
tomasien
Jefferson and Einstein, never trust a quote attributed to them!

------
Mithaldu
As a former player, and customer service representative of the game, i can say
confidently that the reason Ryzom failed had nothing to do with bad luck, and
everything with bad decisions and incompetence.

They had no qualms about changing large parts of the game. The prime example
being that they changed the experience distribution in the game such that
where it was first that any large group of players could play together and
cooperate, after beta it was changed such that only squad-sized groups could
cooperate and squads being in the same area only meant difficulties, since
experience could not be shared anymore.

On the technical side they had a lot of terrible code as a result of much of
their 50 man staff being students doing an internship for free there. They
also had a very bad attitude towards volunteer support staff, where, for
example, an issue on the web site would be reported, the dev in question would
say nothing, and when asked five minutes later would say "What problem, i see
none?" after obviously having fixed it.

Lastly, they also had a very bad attitude to players. The game had guilds and
an ingame browser (kind of hidden, since it was the backend for 90% of the
game UI), so some enterprising players had figured out how to use that to
provide guild forums. The result being legal threats.

As much as i love the game still to this day, and still hold on fondly to the
screenshots and memories i collected in its wonderful world, it wasn't luck
that killed it. It was Nevrax' incompetence and shortsightedness.

------
sz4kerto
Well, according to statistics (see Kahneman) CEO 'performance' has very low
correlation with perceived CEO performance. Also, past success has low
correlation with future success. In other words, there isn't really a 'CEO
skill', or a 'successful manager' skill. In other words, company success is
not repeatable given the same set of people. In other words, yes, luck is
extremely important.

There is no moral of the story other than: failure does not mean that you
didn't do well.

~~~
jfb
"There is no moral of the story other than: failure does not mean that you
didn't do well."

While this lesson is pretty well internalized, I think there's some difficulty
with the converse: just because you succeeded, doesn't mean what you were
doing was right. Life is contingent.

~~~
sz4kerto
Oh yes, that might be even more important. See the Superinvestors of America:
[http://www.tilsonfunds.com/superinvestors.html](http://www.tilsonfunds.com/superinvestors.html)

------
JonFish85
I know it's not the point of the article, specifically, but it's very
difficult to draw any startup conclusions based on a game company. Games are
notoriously difficult to make into successful products, even more-so than your
average startup.

That said, I do think the author has a lot of good points. Surely there is a
portion of "randomness"/luck, but there's also a healthy dose of focus &
determination that make things work.

To play a bit of devil's advocate, I do feel that in the last few years the
idea of "success" has somewhat diverged from what it used to mean. Is Twitter
successful? To their founders & early investors, certainly they are. In 5
years, will Twitter still be relevant & a worthwhile investment to their
millions of new stockholders?

Was Zynga "successful"? Again: to early investors, they were wildly
successful. They were able to dump their shares onto a greater fool.

To me, those are two examples of "lucky" startups. A startup like Salesforce
is less "lucky" and more a well-executed product. It's not as sexy as a
Facebook/Twitter/Zynga, but it's a solid business addressing a specific need.
It isn't reliant on "scale massively and figure out a sustainable business
model later", which to me is what the aforementioned companies are.

To paint a picture, some startups have fisherman tactics: throw as wide of a
net as possible, catch as many things as possible and some small portion will
be valuable. These would be startups to whom luck would seem to play a larger
role (in my opinion).

Others are more focused: identify a specific set of targets to go after, and
hunt them down. This would be more like Salesforce. To me, these are the
startups that don't rely as much on luck.

~~~
acemtp
I'm the author. Thanks for the comment.

I agree with you, I don't know the Saleforce history but I'm quite sure that
at the beginning of the company, they had lot of luck. I'm sure at least 10
other companies tried to address the same problem on the same market and
failed.

Execution is mandatory but lot of the execution is also based on lot of
uncontrollable parameters, hire the right guy at the right time.

Look at Evernote for example, they were almost bankrupt even if the execution
was good, the market here and so on. It's a pure luck if the are still there
and so strong.

~~~
wj
Have you heard of the concept of increasing your luck surface area? If my
memory serves me correctly is that all of the work, networking, etc. you do
the more opportunities you have to get lucky. You can't have chance encounters
in your basement. You can't stumble onto investors for a product that doesn't
exist.

I think it goes along the lines of the quote from The entertainment industry
that every overnight success is a result of years of hard work (paying your
dues in the form of acting/music lessons, community theater/coffee house
performances, tons of auditions).

~~~
acemtp
Yes I heard of the concept of increasing your luck surface area and yes it's
clearly what everyone should do.

------
Sakes
I used to think I was really smart and that my intelligence would carry me
when I finally set out to start a company.

Wrong, while I still consider myself to be smart, I don't think I'm savvy
enough to rely upon good decisions to carry me. There are plenty of people
smarter than me that have failed in their ventures. So, I've reverted to a
brute force strategy coupled with an unrelenting resolve to see projects to
completion.

Just lucky? Not just. When you build your companies with a willingness to
change, frequently self re-evaluating, you will amaze yourself with how much
you grow as an entrepreneur. It is ridiculous what I know today when compared
against my assumptions 2 years ago.

When the author was talking about the failed MMO, I took him at his word when
he said his team created an amazing game. So the point of failure is obviously
marketing. Who knows what could have been if those game developers had a
comparable marketing team in their corner. What if they launched a beta 1 year
into development to help develop a core user group as well as aid in gamer
feedback which could then be redigested by the marketing team to help them
create buzz.

I love this rumored quote assumedly from Jack Dorsey "It only took 10 years
for me to become an overnight success." The entrepreneur that doesn't die is
hardened and polished in failure over a number of years. When luck finally
strikes, he will have the tools, experience, insight, vision to take full
advantage.

I'm 2 years into this journey, hopefully I'll find luck in year 3, and
hopefully I will have grown enough to take full advantage of it.

~~~
kansface
You missed the point of the article. Ultimately, the universe is unfair. No
special insight, ability, breakthrough, or perseverance is sufficient to
change that.

~~~
Sakes
I didn't say anything about fair. I didn't even say that you don't need luck.
I believe you do need luck. But, you can remove a lot of your dependence on
luck by getting better at the game over time, as well as by playing a lot.
Just ask anyone that plays Texas Hold'em.

Want to score more? Get your number of shots on goal up. Luck is just the
positive result of chance being realized. Chance to succeed vs chance to fail.
So as long as you don't care about the number of failures you stack up, you
just keep rolling the dice until you succeed.

Perseverance is sufficient as long as it is accompanied by adaptability. You
simply need the ability to recognize your strengths/weaknesses/personality
type and play the game accordingly. Either invest in improving your
weaknesses, or spend time networking to find a partner to complement them.
Even better, pick an idea where your weaknesses will not be a factor.

What makes startups so hard is all the opportunities to fail that come along
as you try and build something new. Every month, or every week, there is a new
thing that wants to kill you. Sometimes these things have nothing to with the
company. But, there are sooo many ways to mitigate these problems and you
learn how to do so better and better the longer you play the game.

If you'd like me to go into some more personal details to show some examples,
just let me know.

Edited: minor edits.

------
james4k
"Success in [indie] game development is lucky like poker, not lucky like the
lottery."

I forget where I read this; it may have been on Twitter, but it could apply to
startups and probably many other facets of life.

Edit: Found the source.
[https://twitter.com/MattRix/status/401072871323086848](https://twitter.com/MattRix/status/401072871323086848)

------
mhurron
Of course they are lucky. Luck is not the only thing, you really do need
something useful and it has to work so you need to know your audience, but
luck is a big part of it.

You have to be in the right place at the right time. That is all luck.

~~~
choult
_You have to be in the right place at the right time._

You also have to recognize the opportunity and take it. That's what "making
your own luck" is all about - exploiting opportunities to their full.

~~~
Iftheshoefits
This, to me, implies an extraordinary claim of prophetic insight.

The person who "recognizes" the opportunity is still doing a lot of guesswork,
and good luck has as much to do with his recognition of the opportunity as it
does anything else.

Networking and having a head start are also key factors--show me a successful
tech startup and I'd lay better-than-even odds on the founder(s) coming from a
life of (relative) privilege (and also being white, if in America). What could
be luckier than being born to the "correct" parents?

------
tomasien
It keeps me up at night that you could work your entire life in startups, do
everything right and even work on good ideas, and you could still never really
succeed. Then I realize that success (in terms of an exit or something
similar) can't be the goal: I work on startups because I like building things
(edit: things that have the potential to have a tremendous impact) and I want
to change the world.

~~~
varjag
> Then I realize that success (in terms of an exit or something similar) can't
> be the goal: I work on startups because I like building things and I want to
> change the world.

While the above might be a commendable personal goal, startups are indeed
created for their possible exit value. The vision, the tech and the kind of
things you end up working on are commanded or at least heavily influenced by
these circumstances. In that sense there isn't too much difference from
working for an innovative established company (except you don't get a shot at
the money pot).

~~~
tomasien
The startups I work on have that as a top level goal, absolutely and 100% - as
a person, you have to focus on and reward the process as much as the potential
result, or it won't work. Paul Singh is fond of saying "we always celebrate
the result, but we need to celebrate the process". Putting more people in the
right process will produce more positive results, even if not all those people
can achieve the massive results we're learning for.

------
forgottenpaswrd
No, not really.

About being too complex to be controlled, yes maybe, but there is very good
people controlling complexity.

I know lots of entrepreneurs, as I am one myself.

The best entrepreneurs will learn from other people. Take for example Steve
Jobs, he was not born knowing it all, he had f _ck_ ng Robert Noyce as mentor,
and all his life was spent learning from the best he could, like Polaroid
inventor or Sony founder.(every year he will take 100 people from his company
to learn from)

No matter were you are, there is always someone 10 to 20 years over you on a
topic, and the best thing you could do is learn from them instead of thinking
you are inventing gunpowder(Spanish expression that means you are inventing
something revolutionary nobody knows about).

I personally know a man called Warren Buffet. This man, who is super rich
old(normal old people believe they know it all) and famous will cold call you
if he is interested in something you do for please explain it to him, and then
he will start asking you deep questions about your business like crazy and if
you ask him, he would do the same for you for anything you ask. This man has
amazing amounts of valuable knowledge. In public he could not say what he
really things because his word alone is capable of making markets go up or
down.

Successful people do something called "masterminding", that is very similar to
"pay it forward" in Silicon Valley. They learn form each other what works and
what does not. They do it officially or by networking and just talking.

------
gwu78
For anyone arguing that there is some causation behind a startup's success
besides "luck", I challenge you to prove it.

It is not easy to prove causation.

For example, startup says "We did X and this was the direct cause of Y", where
X is some random thing, and Y is "success". That is difficult to prove. And
startups never say that. They just say "We did X." Maybe they also say they
believe this was crucial somehow to their success. But they never try to prove
causation.

Of course, no one demands anyone to prove causation when it comes to the
actions and the success of any startup. The scientifc method does not apply
here. We are happy to listen to someone tell us about what a startup did,
about their eventual success and then let our imaginations make the supposed
causal connections.

I do not think it's unreasonable to question, as does the OP, whether "luck"
is a proper explanation for the success of a startup. If it were, then that
leaves startups free to make their own rules instead of believing they must do
X in order to produce Y. And I say that is fine. The fact is, doing X might
not bring about Y for every startup that does X. Clearly there is more to this
than a "formula", whether it is the YC's or someone else's.

------
jcromartie
This meme is particularly viral among game devs. They say "Notch was lucky",
but what they really mean is that Minecraft resonated with the market more
than they can comprehend. They say "my game failed, and I can't see why, so I
must be unlucky", rather than saying "my game failed, because people didn't
like it more than the alternatives".

Short of people being forced to purchase it, the only thing that makes a
product successful is when people _want_ it. How the product stands on its own
merits is dependent on customers knowing about it, and choosing it over the
alternatives.

When it comes to games, works in the same genre may not even be competing
against each other because of the way gamers buy games. Plenty of gamers will
buy Battlefield AND Call of Duty, or will buy Minecraft AND all of its
derivative clones. They just won't buy things they don't want.

MMORPGs in the same genre, though, are often competing against each other.
People can only play so many MMORPGs because of the time and social aspects.

------
jackgavigan
To echo the monkeys writing Shakespeare analogy, if a hundred startups are
throwing darts at a dartboard, there's a decent chance that at least one of
them will hit the bullseye.

Where network effects are involved, they may not even need to hit the bullseye
- just getting closer to the bullseye than anyone else may be enough.

------
IgorPartola
IMHO, luck is only a factor in success. Failure is much more frequently pre-
determined. For example, a startup with a great idea and a great execution
still might fail, while a startup with a terrible idea or poor execution will
almost definitely fail. I think of startups as needing to be not good but good
enough: if the idea and execution are good enough, other factors start
mattering. However, if they are not good enough, then no amount of luck will
change that in the long run.

For example, the Color app had all the resources (funding, contacts), but the
basic value proposition was just not there. They never had a chance. OTOH,
Turntable.fm had a great product, but as luck would have it, they did not make
it. Either the timing wasn't right or something else, but despite everything
they are having to pivot.

------
rowyourboat
It's doing-the-right-things plus luck.

You do need to be good at marketing. You do need to get product-market-fit
quickly. You do need to have a good product, and so on.

The better you are at these things, the less luck is required. But you cannot
get the amount of luck needed down to zero.

~~~
chew827
Seems like this is kind of a parallel to his "lottery" analogy - doing those
things is sort of like buying another ticket. Your chances might be better but
it doesn't mean you're going to win.

------
adventured
"Think of it like a lottery. In this case the obvious decision is to buy more
tickets in order to get more chances to win."

I like what Seth Godin has to say on failing until you succeed:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDtkBsWgzWE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDtkBsWgzWE)

And this article by Scott Adams:

"What's the best way to climb to the top? Be a failure."

[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230462610...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626104579121813075903866)

~~~
chew827
I love Seth Godin, he seems to have universally good advice. Sometimes his
blog is hard to follow but it's usually a pretty good read.

I love the quote "if I fail more times than you I win."

------
cousin_it
If successful startups are just lucky, I have some questions:

\- What's the expected monetary return for someone wishing to enter the
startup game? In particular, is it positive or negative? For example, the
usual platitude "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" also applies to
the lottery, where the expected return is negative. Could it be the case that
rational people just shouldn't do startups?

\- What's the expected return after adjusting for diminishing marginal utility
of money? For example, a person with 2 million dollars is not 2x happier than
a person with 1 million. This increases the impact of the previous point: even
if the decision to a startup gives you positive expected money, it could still
lead to negative expected change in happiness. Most of the monetary wins go to
a lucky few, which doesn't raise their happiness enough to compensate for the
unhappiness of the unlucky many.

\- What's the expected return if you take the previous two points into
account, and also compare against the next best thing you could've done
instead of a startup? For example, is there anyone on Earth who's deciding
whether to do a startup and who wouldn't get higher expected money,
happiness... everything, just by getting hired at Google?

\- Given the above points, is it ever morally okay to advise someone to do a
startup? What advice would you give people if you were truly, honestly immune
to survivorship bias?

~~~
seiji
It's not random in the sense that "anybody who tries has an equal chance at
success." The prior you're missing is a person's ability, current mind, and
biological mental capacity. Some people are just _waaaaaaaaay_ smarter than
other people. "All people are created equal" is a fantasy when you reach
extremes (sport abilities, mental abilities, creative abilities).

Now, once you have a baseline genius startup mind, no success is guaranteed
anyway. Twitter would be nothing without an Internet-famous founder and
techcrunch hyping it up constantly its first few years of existence.

That's not saying you can't be rich. Anybody can always get dumb success
(especially these days) with things like advertising or affiliates or ebooks.

The money doesn't enable your happiness — the freedom money provides enables
your happiness. You can substitute being rich with having a job/life you don't
hate plus a good salary.

~~~
avenger123
"That's not saying you can't be rich. Anybody can always get dumb success
(especially these days) with things like advertising or affiliates or ebooks."

People that are doing this should speakup but I don't believe "anybody" can do
the above. Your statement is general to a certain extent and could apply to
many areas but I don't think successful people in these areas are any less
smart, hardworking, determined than startup founders.

~~~
seiji
I know people who write really low quality populist fiction on the Amazon
Kindle store and bring in over $3k/month. Over time, the old books still sell,
so you have recurring revenue that gets compounded as time goes on.

There are other examples, but that's the easiest to understand.

------
thejteam
Luck and skill tend to have the same distributions (generally a normal curve).
As an outsider looking in, it is difficult to tell the difference. In fact, it
can be difficult as an insider as well. We may have a plan, and attribute our
success, or failure, to the plan rather than to luck. Or something could look
like luck to an outsider because they don't understand all of the intricacies
that go into making a system work.

------
ferrantim
Great blog Vianney. I just attended a conference last week full of silicon
valley's best and brightest ([http://warmgun.com/](http://warmgun.com/)). I
don't think that things are totally random, but I was struck by the million
different ways to success (and failure). Chance definitely has a lot to do
with it. It allows the really hard work to pay off.

------
neakor
Luck by definition is based on chance, something one cannot fully control. A
startup of course involves luck, simplify because no company can control all
the factors involved in becoming a success. So yes, I completely agree that
successful startups are lucky. However, it's not "just" lucky as your title
suggests. Just like playing lottery or gambling, there are ways you can
maximize your chances of winning. Buy more lottery tickets as your blog post
says, is one way to maximize the chance. In the startup world, obtaining the
right skills, choosing the right features to implement, making the right
connections and a million and one others are all the things you can do to
maximize your chances of building a successful startup. I think your post
illustrates the right idea that there is luck and chance involved at building
a successful startup. But isn't that the case for everything in life? In the
end, the rule of thumb is, "do whatever you can, and the rest is luck".

------
DanielBMarkham
To put a little finer point on it, what if successful startups have enough
randomly-uncontrolled and untracked things happen to them to make them
successful as to be not reproducible?

So you do all the right things, and you still only have a 1-in-20 chance. Or
the other guy does all the wrong things, and he sells out in two years for 20
Million. A third guy does some good things and some really bad things, still
manages to grow and flip, then he writes a book on "How to have a successful
startup" that claims to know the answers.

As far as I can tell, this is pretty close to the state of things, and that's
okay. It just means 1) you can't give up, and 2) you need to choose your
strategy based on this state of affairs.

What you _don 't_ want to do is to acknowledge there is randomness, then throw
in the towel. Or to go on some jag where you hero worship Zuckerberg or some
other rich schmuck simply because the startup lottery hit for them. The truth
is much more complicated -- and involves a lot of hard work.

------
EricDeb
Obviously successful startups are lucky. I think the idea of releasing
quickly/efficiently is to test the market to see if a larger, more complex
product is desired (IOW can you get lucky?). In the example provided, a beta
release of one level of Ryzom could have saved years of dev time if it was not
well received.

~~~
Mithaldu
They did a beta release. People loved it. Then they did a massive change to XP
distribution shortly before release that forced people to run in single
squads, because experience couldn't be shared among multiple squads
cooperating anymore. People hated it. Nevrax didn't give a fuck and released
anyhow.

------
spyder
If successful startups are just lucky then you should have as many startups as
you can to get more chance at winning. That could mean focusing on quantity
instead quality. Also that can be the reason behind MVPs: do something minimal
that works then move onto the next project.

------
lacero
High growth start-ups are nothing but luck. How does a company built in a
garage with practically no marketing budget get such high growth numbers in
the initial stages (facebook, twitter, snapchat, instagram,etc)? They manage
to go viral. Pure herd mentality.

------
adamb_
"Even if it's not random, it's too complex to be controlled." \- OP.

I think it's this realization that gives rise to quotes like, "Talent hits a
target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." by
Arthur Schopenhauer.

------
sharemywin
A start founders charisma points must be very high. You have to get others(co-
founders, future employees, investors, ealry customers) to believe in your
vision. And I'm not sure that's teachable. But, there are many ways to pull it
off.

------
spindritf
What if successful startup founders have high IQs? Or particular personalities
making them persevere? It's entirely possible that all those methods and
practices count for nothing or are completely eclipsed by IQs, luck,
networks...

This argument is being made against education. How much education really
matters and how much outcomes are just a matter of raw cognitive ability of
students and (self-)selection?

Truth is that we don't know. So most people choose to follow in the footsteps
of those who have demonstrable achievements and hope for the best.

BTW This might be the first time I'm seeing a ghost blog in the wild. Just
browsing the Internet, not looking at ghost blogs specifically.

~~~
acemtp
As you said, we don't know.

I moved to ghost 2 days ago and for the moment, it works quite nicely!

------
devgutt
I think that it is some misunderstanding between be successful and have money.
Money is the consequence, but the objective of a business should be create
real value. In this sense, if you have only a few customers but you are
delivering real value, you are successful. Take youtube, for example. They
were a very successful company in the beginning, delivering a delightful
experience. Now, if you consider money as objective, they are still
successful, but they are not. They now deliver a awful experience, with Ads in
the beginning, middle and the end of each video. For me, no matter how much
money they are making, they just not successful anymore.

------
dsugarman
The problem is that it is hard to give each project any real chance of success
without spending your full effort on seeing it through. A strategy like this
will make you abandon your good projects at the first resemblance of a road
block.

------
levlandau
Honestly, this is poorly written. The author ends up giving advice even though
he starts out claiming that is a problematic thing to do. His advice is not so
different from common startup knowledge-- success is proportional to the
number of swings of the bat. That I think any founder can take to the bank. It
is true regardless of what your personal situation is. Obeying a simulated
annealing algorithm rapidly through life keeps you from looking too far ahead
and from getting stuck in ruts. There are many other generalizations largely
independent of your personal story that are very helpful.

------
GigabyteCoin
Just because OPs game floundered does not mean that startups must be lucky to
succeed.

OP was quite proud of his game, is confident is was great because there were
15 talented people working on it... but ultimately the idea didn't resonate
with the public in the way they implemented it.

Notch on the other hand resonated with the public incredibly well. By giving
away completely free versions and listening to, even literally interacting
with game players: He now heads a very successful software company where most
of the original code was written by one man.

I don't think a successful company necessarily involves luck at all.

------
amiune
If you define luck as the happening of an event that the probability of not
happening is greater than the probability of happening. Then all depends on
how well you can calculate your probabilities of success and how much risk you
want to take.

Of course you can't be 100% sure that you are going to be successful. But you
must try to increase your probabilities as much as you can, trying to predict
your probabilities as accurate as you can.

As Laplace said: "Life's most important questions are, for the most part,
nothing but probability problems".

------
adamzerner
I think luck is a trivial factor in a startups success if you're smart. If you
think about success more reductively, and ask yourself "what has to happen for
me to succeed?" and "can I accomplish those things?", you'll see that luck
isn't too big a factor. I wrote an article that talks about this:
[https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/cd29597704f9](https://medium.com/i-m-
h-o/cd29597704f9).

------
dreamdu5t
This argument compares apples to oranges. Your game was not the same as World
of Warcraft. It had completely different graphics, different marketing,
distribution, gameplay, etc. Facebook is not Google+. Windows is not OS X.

Lottery tickets are apples to apples. Yes, the problem domains for these
start-ups may overlap, but these are not apples to apples. Your MMO was not
the same as WoW.

The differentiating factor between your MMO and WoW was not _just_ luck.
They're different games.

------
brandonhsiao
It seems weird to be shocked that success in a startup depends on luck. Of
course it does; we already know that from seeing how widely the returns
fluctuate. But that doesn't mean successful startup founders aren't smart. A
good way to put it would be that, while your chances of success are random, if
you're smart and determined your chances are higher. If you aren't smart or
determined, you don't qualify for the lottery at all.

------
martindale
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have
of it." — Thomas Jefferson

"The harder I work, the luckier I get." — Samuel Goldwyn

~~~
baddox
The more lottery tickets you buy, the higher chance you have to win the
lottery.

------
dpeck
Chance favors the prepared mind.

------
hkbarton
Great post and I'm totally agree. Once I got a idea, i do it quick and release
it earlier, that's cool than just talking. but i usually lost after I release
my first version of my project. I don't know how to promote my product, how to
raise traffic and how to let people know my product, that makes me really
confuse. I think marketing knowledge is also very important for engineer

------
boldpanda
The only startups that are "lucky" are those that never validate before
development and still find traction.

I define validating as getting 3 paying customers before building a viable
app.

You could have built an abridged or simpler version of your game and asked
people to pay you to play it. If that posed problems, you could have pivoted
to a different premise for the game.

------
pan69
Are famous artists such as musicians and actors just lucky or do they actually
need the talent as well?

You can have all the talent in the world but not lucky to be in the right
place at the right time. However, when you are at the right place at the right
time you better make sure you bring the talent.

One doesn't exclude the other, you need both: talent + luck = success

------
KSS42
1/3 Talent, 1/3 Effort, 1/3 Luck

------
cromwellian
My essay on the subject, cast in terms of climbing a fitness landscape and
getting stuck in local optima:
[https://plus.google.com/u/1/+RayCromwell/posts/5bhdU8hF68t](https://plus.google.com/u/1/+RayCromwell/posts/5bhdU8hF68t)

------
rythie
I've noticed that people who win the lottery are the ones who bought tickets.
Also the ones that win usually play every week, increasing their chances.

So at this point how are you defining lucky? They might be lucky but then they
also worked harder and longer (i.e. bought more tickets)

~~~
robotnik
The lottery analogy made me think of this: Even if most startups fail, is the
expected value nonetheless positive?

------
frozenport
Guy releases a unfun game with less then half the budget of his competitors
and no name recognition along with poor marketing. Also program was
technically ambitious. Then claims its random chance.

THIS IS precisely why its not random!!!

------
polskibus
Among the best, luck is more important for winning than between best and
mediocre (where skill is more important). I thought this was common knowledge
after being described in so many pop.sci. books like black swan,etc.

------
Guest2931
It's similar to a video going viral. Luck is always a factor, but you need
less of it as the quality of your video increases.

------
scottmcleod
"I'd rather be lucky than good - but nothing beats lucky and good."

------
pekk
Obviously it can't be about luck, because that would deflate a lot of egos.

------
thejerz
It all depends on what -- exactly -- you define as "luck."

------
rjurney
If startups are luck, you should found as many as possible.

~~~
inovator
Exactly, that is why "most" of founders failed multiple times before they
become successful.

------
tehwalrus
of course they are. But you have to have been working hard all those
months/years, so you can capitalise on the luck when it comes.

------
ThomPete
First you are lucky, then you have a network.

------
leoplct
There is no lucky

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_\(book\))

------
izietto
This is what I always thought.

------
alecco
Interesting topic, but the blogpost lacks data.

------
man_bear_pig
Michael Jordan and Lebron James definitely get lucky... But I'd bet on them
hitting that lucky shot more than 99% of other basketball players because they
just know how to execute. One of my friends was a top 10 high frequency equity
futures (snp minis) trader in the u.s. i used to think damn he gets lucky all
the fking time. i mean at best it's like 70/30 ratio. just pure luck. how does
he just call the tops and bottom and never read a sec filing or financials of
a company?! nope he is really that good at execution, and that's why he's only
right 70% of the time whereas others are just coin flipping.

a lot of times. timing is luck. but a lot of people get lucky on timing...
it's like if the bubble bursted next year then people would have said there
was never an easier market to raise money / take risks / make quick money in
mobile,social, etc. but i'm pretty sure there's a ton of smart people with
luck on their side that's trying to do that right now; and 100 other variables
besides luck will make majority of businesses fail.

how do you define luck? break down the components of luck.

------
mkramlich
there is definitely an element of "luck" (timing, what other actors in the
relevant space are doing, etc.)

but the way you hedge against that is by exposing yourself to lots of things
with a potential net upside. both in parallel and serially. you might have bad
luck with one thing, then good luck with another thing. just like the
reasoning behind YC-style investment bets, it only takes one of your little
bets to pay off huge in order to more than make up for all the other little
failures. which leads to the other complimentary tactic: minimize your spend
(money,time,energy) you're willing to risk on any given thing before you see
an ROI from it. Also, you never have to completely give up on a thing --- in
the software/digital world especially you don't have to
destroy/delete/throwaway things, you simply passivate them (put on the
backburner), press Pause, etc.

------
goggles99
LOL... sorry to laugh, but casual perception should tell you that if you have
a startup and your first product's release is a PC game with a date that is
four years out (Four YEARS?) - You are going to need more than just luck to be
successful.

------
segmondy
If successful startups are just lucky, then getting an A on your project/exams
in school was all luck. Can someone show us someone making money with shitty
products today? Yeah, it's possible to get popular with an incomplete buggy
product, but if it's filling a need, it's better than nothing. You will still
have to work hard and improve to maintain your position.

Say what you might about how facebooks earlier/current code was/is horrible
and in PHP, Facebook has done amazing things to be able to handle a billion
users every second/every day. Say what you might about how simple instagram or
snapshot is, they filled a need and grew. Their products doesn't "suck", sure
they might be valued ridiculously by some groups of investors, but don't
discount their work.

Successful startups are not JUST lucky. There is always an element of lucky,
but there is also the hardwork. One mistake a lot of "failed" startups make is
thinking and believing that they failed. If your goal is to create an
application that solves a certain problem and you do so. You have succeeded. A
lot of startups have this goal, they don't really have a goal of making money.
After they achieve a goal of building their app, then they want to make money
and when they fail on that end, they consider everything a failure. The truth
is that making money is not just about your apps or how smart you are or hard
you worked to designed.

It takes a very different set of skills to market, hustle, and sell. A lot of
programmers don't have those business skills, and they whine and cry when the
world don't rush to their door for the better mouse trap. Don't cry, the world
didn't know because you failed to market or they have heavily vested in
another one because you started late.

If you want to really realize that startups are not just lucky, find the other
group we don't talk about on HN that make money off the internet. The
hustlers, these are guys with little to zero tech knowledge. They do whatever
they can, outsource via internet, basic wordpress sites, they sell actually
products, their business is rarely based on ads, their business is physical
products, software as a service or ebooks etc. Technology is usually a small
part of their game, maybe 10%, the other 90% is pure sweat and hustling. We
don't hear for them, but there are many of them out there, making very good
money.

Successful starts are not lucky, they out hustled the rest and that's just
what it is. So if you wish to make money, don't just stay a hacker, become a
hacker and a hustler.

