Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree with you I find the same to be true of successful companies. When you ask a successful founder why (s)he succeeded you'l most often get an answer aided by hindsight. It appears to me that nobody truly knows what makes or breaks a company. There are some prerequistes (hard work, focus on customers, etc.) that you have to have, but these aren't enough. My guess is that it's like the weather and financial…
Not exactly. I can't find the citation just this second, but there was an article floating about showing that successful founders tend to be much more successful on subsequent projects than the baseline. I don't think it's chaos or luck. I've argued it before, but there are traits that make successful founders successful. The one that always stands out to me is an absolute laser focus on analytics. These founders are…
But there's a flaw to the argument. You can spend all of your time measuring success factors and acting on the data. But there are limits both to how much you data you can make sense of, how much effort you can allow yourself to spend gathering that data, and how you interpret that data.
finding a cofounder, for example, is a critical component of success, but how will you pick a good cofounder based on data? Can you even do that? Notwithstanding that the hardest part about finding a cofounder is actually locating potential candidates to pick from.
In chaos theory you can actually predict the weather if you have data that's exact enough. But you don't. There's just noway you can measure everything exact enough. I think the same applies here.