What if successful startups are just lucky?

Great blog Vianney. I just attended a conference last week full of silicon valley's best and brightest (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.

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.

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)

Though the right place at the right time is almost never at home watching TV. Getting out and meeting a lot of people greatly increases the chance that you will be in the right place at some point.

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.