Comment by immibis
3 days ago
It's hugely about luck. We can look back on any success story and identify what made it successful (sometimes) but it only has a little predictive power. Success in startupping ultimately comes from either trying a lot of things (amplifying your luck until it approaches 100%) or survivorship bias when you get lucky on your first try and then write about how smart you are.
It helps to have an idea of what might succeed, by studying things that succeeded before and the present business environment, but that increases each attempt's success chance to, like, 2% rather than 0.2%.
(There's nothing wrong with getting lucky, we just probably shouldn't plan around it being the normal case. It has extreme variance by definition.)
Luck plays a huge part.
But it's not the only part. All the luck in the world won't win me an Olympic medal. Yes, luck plays a part. But it also takes the right work, learning the correct skills, having the discipline and so on.
Working on the right thing, at the right time, in the right way are all crucial ingredients. All the luck in the world though can't help you if you're playing the wrong game.
That's luck. No one knows the right thing, the right time, or the right way. Studying past right things, past right times, and past right ways can give you maybe a 2% chance of getting them right instead of 0.2%. Only after someone got them right (by chance) can we look back and say "Wow! That person got them right!"