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What if successful startups are just lucky?

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Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#31

Post by gruseom »

evanspa wrote: post #27
tomasien wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

Quote Investigator has tackled this one:

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.

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#32

Post by tomasien »

evanspa wrote: post #27
tomasien wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

It was just because Thomas Jefferson said it and Joe Harris goes to the University he founded, it's just bizarre that I saw it 2 times in less than 10 seconds.

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#33

Post by 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.

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#34

Post by enraged_camel »

tomasien wrote: post #10

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.

>> I work on startups because I like building things and I want to change the world.

That's nice, but you also need to be able to pay the bills, right?

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#35

Post by 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.

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#36

Post by kristofferR »

jxf wrote: post #4

"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...

  Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
  – Seneca

  Fools wait for a lucky day but every day is a lucky day for an industrious man.
  – Buddha

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#37

Post by HNJohnC »

sz4kerto wrote: post #14

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 st…

Yes, we (should) all know that but somehow we are still deluged with books and blog posts from these lucky few telling the rest of us how to do it. Worse yet too many are taking it as gospel when they really should just do it their own way.

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#38

Post by mathattack »

kristiandupont wrote: post #18

This has been on my mind lately as well, for some reason. That, and the point of this story 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 qu…

My intuition is that it's very random. A business professor and economist (Luigi Zingales) once commented that lots of firms tend to find new ideas all at the same time. When the market is ripe and the arrows point in the same direction, everyone seems to find it. Execution is important, but a lot of randomness hits the process too.

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#39

Post by chew827 »

rowyourboat wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#40

Post by jfb »

sz4kerto wrote: post #14

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 st…

"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.

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