How much does luck influence startups?

Interesting:

I tried to follow all the good advice successful entrepreneurs gave when explaining their accomplishments.

For example I started writing a blog. Some say content marketing is a key to success – to create a community that would be useful once the product is released. I also started looking at methodologies like Lean Startup. I released fast and failed fast. I went to startup events to find a co-founder because they said that it’s mandatory if you want to succeed and so on…

I read so many things about successful entrepreneurs that in the end it became blurry in my head. They all gave opposing advice. When someone says you should do X someone else says you shouldn’t do X. It felt like their advice was good, but only for them.

After a discussion with some friends about this awesome article talking about Survivorship Bias, I discovered Nassim Taleb’s book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Everything I read and experienced became obvious.

What if startup success was just completely random?

Perhaps not as random as the mathematical definition but in that there are too many parameters that you -and nobody for that matter – cannot control that in the end, even if it’s not random, it’s too complex to be controlled.

You can take one parameter such as how many founders should you have, do some research, perform analysis, and extrapolate. However in the end it’ll be completely wrong for your project because you need to take into account all the other parameters. Something that works for someone will not work for you because you are not them.

I know you prefer to think you are smart, experienced, skilled, and you know what you need to do to create a successful start. But, please, just for one second, imagine that this not the case. Imagine that it’s just random.

It’s interesting because in this mindset your vision of how to succeed is really different. You start thinking about how to maximize your chances to win at a random game.

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. In the startup world it could mean that you should try as many different projects as you can. On each project you should always experiment and try a lot of different things to see what delivers you good feedback.