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What if successful startups are just lucky?

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Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#81

Post by amiune »

If you define luck as the happening of an event that the probability of not happening is greater than the probability of happening. Then all depends on how well you can calculate your probabilities of success and how much risk you want to take.

Of course you can't be 100% sure that you are going to be successful. But you must try to increase your probabilities as much as you can, trying to predict your probabilities as accurate as you can.

As Laplace said: "Life's most important questions are, for the most part, nothing but probability problems".

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#82

Post by acemtp »

pg wrote: post #71

All 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.

It's not luck for you, it's luck for entrepreneur.

Your job is to select people who were lucky enough to meet the right people, meet the market, had luck to have enough traction, lived in a country where he could spend time learning and so on...

But when you are entrepreneur, you have to maximize your luck by maximizing number of opportunities.

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#83

Post by EricDeb »

Obviously successful startups are lucky. I think the idea of releasing quickly/efficiently is to test the market to see if a larger, more complex product is desired (IOW can you get lucky?). In the example provided, a beta release of one level of Ryzom could have saved years of dev time if it was not well received.

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#84

Post by neakor »

Luck by definition is based on chance, something one cannot fully control. A startup of course involves luck, simplify because no company can control all the factors involved in becoming a success. So yes, I completely agree that successful startups are lucky. However, it's not "just" lucky as your title suggests. Just like playing lottery or gambling, there are ways you can maximize your chances of winning. Buy more lottery tickets as your blog post says, is one way to maximize the chance. In the startup world, obtaining the right skills, choosing the right features to implement, making the right connections and a million and one others are all the things you can do to maximize your chances of building a successful startup. I think your post illustrates the right idea that there is luck and chance involved at building a successful startup. But isn't that the case for everything in life? In the end, the rule of thumb is, "do whatever you can, and the rest is luck".

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#86

Post by bluekite2000 »

FD3SA wrote: post #63

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 bas…

"Don't regret making works of art. It is all that succeeds us when we leave this realm." Good words my man!

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#87

Post by nwhitehead »

pg wrote: post #71

All 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.

I would absolutely love to see a double-blind randomized experiment with controls for YC applications. In one batch, randomly and secretly assign CONTROL or EXPERIMENT to each application (in whatever proportion you are comfortable with). Of the CONTROL batch, do regular reviews. For the EXPERIMENT batch, randomly accept the same percentage of groups as the control. Then have people outside of the reviewers try to label each group correctly at different stages and see how they do. These people could be: YC alums, YC staff not on the interview loop, VCs making investments, outside experienced CEOs, successful startup founders.

For full double-blindness you could even do interviews with the EXPERIMENT group, then use a program to automatically either use the interview result or not. This might be aggravating for reviewers, though, seeing their work wasted by random choices.

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#88

Post by pesenti »

pg wrote: post #71

All 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.

In order for us to "believe you", you would need to test your hypothesis at least once - for example, by selecting a small number the startups you invest in at random and see how they fare compared to the other startups. Keep in mind that most stock pickers would respond exactly like you even though their choices are rarely (if ever) better than chance.

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#89

Post by acangiano »

pg wrote: post #71

All 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.

That would actually be a rather interesting, if costly, experiment for you guys to try.

Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?

#90

Post by pan69 »

Are famous artists such as musicians and actors just lucky or do they actually need the talent as well?

You can have all the talent in the world but not lucky to be in the right place at the right time. However, when you are at the right place at the right time you better make sure you bring the talent.

One doesn't exclude the other, you need both: talent + luck = success

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