It all depends on what -- exactly -- you define as "luck."
What if successful startups are just lucky?
111–120 of 183 posts
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#112All 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.
What about if given enough time and access to enough resources?
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#113"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...
His slaves worked pretty hard too though. Just saying.
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#114"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...
They wait for IT to come. I became IT.
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#115All 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.
You just need to let in exclusively the crazy startups, the insane ones. That's the only metric.
90% failure rates, but the remaining 10% (5 startups) is all Dropboxes and AirBNBs --> Average YC startup valuation up 10-fold.
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#116This is what I always thought.
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#117Great 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
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#118As 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.
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#119Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#120One 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 bas…
Don't regret making works of art. It is all that succeeds us when we leave this realm. Sometimes I feel this is our main differentiation from other species.
Yeah, any member of animal kingdom can rationally analyze situations and make logical decisions based on facts, but art, on the other hand, is unique to humans.