What if successful startups are just lucky?
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What if successful startups are just lucky?
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Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#2[deleted]
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#3Of course they are lucky. Luck is not the only thing, you really do need something useful and it has to work so you need to know your audience, but luck is a big part of it.
You have to be in the right place at the right time. That is all luck.
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#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...
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#5It'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.
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#6[deleted]
That doesn't actually apply here, though it might if it were worded: 'Are all successful startups just lucky?'. 'No' is not a valid answer to a 'What if?' question.
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#7"Think of it like a lottery. In this case the obvious decision is to buy more tickets in order to get more chances to win."
I like what Seth Godin has to say on failing until you succeed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDtkBsWgzWE
And this article by Scott Adams:
"What's the best way to climb to the top? Be a failure."
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230462610...
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#8"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...
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).
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#9Of course they are lucky. Luck is not the only thing, you really do need something useful and it has to work so you need to know your audience, but luck is a big part of it. You have to be in the right place at the right time. That is all luck.
You have to be in the right place at the right time.
You also have to recognize the opportunity and take it. That's what "making your own luck" is all about - exploiting opportunities to their full.
Re: What if successful startups are just lucky?
#10It 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.