I agree, unicorn founders are not a bazillion times smarter than the rest of us, maybe 1.05X smarter and 10,000X luckier.
But what is the formula for luck? Do we have some minor control over that? I think I read somewhere that luck=opportunity + preparation. Preparation we have control over, but we must be preparing for the right thing. I guess we have some control over opportunity, which might include building your network and getting out of the basement once in a while.
Good question. The problem with "luck" is that you only know what's good or bad in hindsight. For example, if Google had been acquired for $1M the founders may have lived happily every after. Only in hindsight we can say that it was lucky the deal fell through. So I guess it'd be better to call them "random events" instead of "luck".
I do believe that we can influence our luck (increase or decrease the likelihood of said random events) but I think some people are better at capitalising on random events than others.
But despite our influences or skills at making use of these things, at some point random chance does take over and we have no control over that. All we can do is influence the probability of random events, not control them completely.
